September 20, 2012
Barbara’s Bookstore, headquartered in Chicago, will be expanding their presence in Macy’s nationally starting next year, according to PW. This summer 40 stores around the country have opened patterned after the Chicago State Street setup. These are modest 1600 sq. ft. operations that will provide a small book area, but nothing close to a full […]
September 19, 2012
Ancient Egyptians didn’t only speak through hieroglyphs – they spoke and wrote Demotic Egyptian, meaning “the tongue of the demos, or the common people.” Now scholars at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute have published online a 2,000-page dictionary of these Demotic words. This Chicago Demotic Dictionary is being called “an indispensable tool for reconstructing […]
September 13, 2012
Philip Roth has written to Wikipedia denying that his novel The Human Stain was based on the life of Anatole Broyard. Instead, he contends, it was based on “an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some 30 years.” The novel, published in 2000, deals […]
September 13, 2012
The six finalists for the Man Booker Prize (limited to English language books and authors from the Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe) were announced this week. Hilary Mantel won three years ago and there’s been some speculation that she’s favored to win again for “Bring up the Bodies”. The rest of the list: Tan Twan Eng, […]
September 11, 2012
EarlyWord reports that according to the NY Times a veritable glut of new titles from “superstar” authors will be arriving, some of whom haven’t published a book in years. Considering I heard an interview with Junot Diaz this morning on NPR about “This is How You Lose Her” (which was interesting because Diaz explained his […]
September 5, 2012
According to this New York Times article, architect Frank Lloyd Wright saved almost every sketch or drawing he ever did, including “a doodle on a Plaza Hotel cocktail napkin of an imagined city on Ellis Island, and his earliest pencil sketch of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum”. When he died in 1959 all of his papers […]
September 4, 2012
In this recent Chicago Tribune article, Ellen Jean Hirst reports on a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray returned 78 years late. As I posted here last month, the Chicago Public Library had instituted a “Once in a Blue Moon” amnesty running from August 20th through September 7th, so, luckily, the patron […]
August 30, 2012
In recent meetings with book publishers, Jeremy Greenfield, editorial director of Digital Book World, says some believe continuing and even expanding ebook offerings to libraries will help their business. Others are not so sure. Greenfield was one of the guests on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show earlier this week which was devoted to the topic of library ebook lending. Susan […]
August 28, 2012
Worldcon is starting in a few days–this is one of the major science fiction gatherings of writers and fans. The Hugo Awards (World Science Fiction Society) will be announced and you will be able to see a real astronaut! (For those of you who are interested in etymologies, the Worldcon site discusses the roots of […]
August 27, 2012
Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang won the $200,000 Steinberg award for playwriting, considered the most generous prize in theater. He said the award will allow him to focus primarily on writing plays. He is finishing a new work inspired by the life of Bruce Lee, “Kung Fu,” which will be staged Off Broadway in […]
