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Sports writer Rich Cohen in Chicago area this week

November 5, 2013

I heard the interview with Rich Cohen on NPR recently and, lo and behold, he’s touring our area to promote his new book, “Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football.” He was informative about football history and gave quite a bit of background surrounding the famed ’85 Bears. (This is from someone who’s still trying to figure out who gets to tackle who!)

Tomorrow he’ll be speaking in Naperville at 7 Pm at Anderson’s. Thursday Cohen will appear at Soldier Field with other sports folk at 6PM and a book signing will follow. Next week, if that’s not enough for you, he should be in Milwaukee and Vernon Hills. An Amazon Book of the Month. EPL books on Da Bears.

Shira S.

Neustadt International Prize for Literature

The 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature has been awarded to Mozambican author Antonio Emilio Leite Couto (Mia Couto). The first Mozambican author to be nominated for and to win this prize, Couto noted: “It is a sad moment for Mozambique because we are starting a war that we thought would never come back again. So to receive this good news is something like a compensation for me.” Born in 1955, his first novel Sleepwalking Land was published in 1992. Gabriella Ghermandi, who nominated him for the prize, said: “He is an author who addresses not just his country but the entire world, all human beings.” The $50,000 biennial prize is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, the Neustadt family, and the university’s magazine World Literature Today. Often called the “American Nobel, it is the only international literary award for which poets, novelists and playwrights are equally eligible. Read more in today’s NPR article.

Laura

2013 National Book Award Finalists

October 17, 2013

The National Book Foundation announced the shortlist of finalists for this year’s National Book Awards. The award ceremony will be held on November 20. The finalists for fiction include: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiria; The Good Lord Bird by James McBride; Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon; and Tenth of December by George Saunders. Nonfiction finalists are: Book of Ages by Jill Lepore; Hitler’s Furies by Wendy Lower; The Unwinding by George Packer; The Internal Enemy by Alan Taylor; and Going Clear by Lawrence Wright. In young people’s literature, finalists are The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt; The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata; Far Far AWay by Tom McNeal; Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff; and Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang. And in poetry, the finalists are Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart; Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido; The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka; Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen; and Incarnadine by Mary Szybist. For more in-depth information on these books, see today’s NPR article.

Laura

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Oscar Hijuelos Dies at 62

October 14, 2013

Cuban-American novelist Oscar Hijuelos who who the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, died of a heart attack on Saturday. He won international acclaim for his novel and was the first Latino writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The story of the Castillo brothers who travel from Havana to New York to start an orchestra was made into a movie starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas in 1992. Born in New York in 1951, Mr. Hijuelos’s work “captured the loss and triumphs of the Cuban immigrant experience.” You can read the NPR article here. Check the EPL catalog for other titles by this author, including his 2011 memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes.

Laura

Irish Poet Seamus Heaney Dies at 74

August 30, 2013

Celebrated and prolific poet Seamus Heaney died in Dublin today after a brief illness. Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was described by Robert Lowell as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” In 2008, on NPR’s program All Things Considered Mr. Heaney said: “I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.” In addition to his poetry, he was praised for his translations, including his version of Beowulf. Read both the NYT article and the NPR article here. And check the EPL catalog for his works. Here is his poem The Railway Children (from Station Island) that he read on NPR:

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words traveled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

Laura

Marian McPartland, Jazz Pianist And NPR Radio Host,1918-2013

August 23, 2013

Acclaimed jazz pianist Marian McPartland died at the age of 95 on August 20. Born in England and trained as a classical pianist, she was “drawn to the improvisational freedom of jazz.” and succeeded, according to critic Leonard Feather in spite of “three hopeless strikes against her: she was British, white, and a woman.” Besides recording over 50 albums, Ms. McPartland composed music, and led the way for other female jazz performers from Carmen McRae to Norah Jones. She is perhaps best remembered for her interviews and performances with other musicians on her long-running NPR program “Piano Jazz” which first aired in 1979. In 1958 she was one of two women included in the famous portrait of jazz musicians which inspired the 1994 documentary A Great Day in Harlem. She won a “Lifetime Achievement” Grammy in 2004 and in 2010, was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. You can read the entire NPR article here and the Washington Post obit here. And check out the EPL catalog for her recordings.

Laura

Want to read a rare book? Check it out from the DPLA.

August 20, 2013

More from NPR’s Keys to the Whole World: American Public Libraries. Laura Sydell reported on the launch this last spring of a program to canvass the nation’s libraries for rare and important archival material that can be digitized and available for free to the American public through the Digital Public Library of America. Scholars and researchers are already excited at the prospect of all this great stuff in one place. According to one researcher, it would have been really hard to find the documents he needed by doing a general Internet search. He said, “It’s hard to know, apart from … lots and lots of browsing, where those collections are available.” Another benefit was pointed out by the San Francisco Public Library’s archivist, Susan Goldstein, who finds so many of the materials they have archived in such poor condition that the digitizing effort serves as a preservation tactic for fragile items. Many of those involved in this project are dedicated to the idea that this material is to be freely available to the general public, grammar school kids to PhD researchers. For now the massive amount of scanning and uploading involves older materials–books, letters, diaries, newspapers, police records, and more–where copyright and ownership are not an issue. For the future, the relationship of libraries and publishers will need to be addressed before any grand scale digitizing can happen.

(Shown above right: A letter written by onetime slave owner William H.W. Barnwell.)

Barbara L.

The Library as Film Star

August 9, 2013

NPR’s All Things Considered continues its series on public libraries in this story by Bob Mondello highlighting the library “on stage, on screen, and in song.” He refers to stereotypes such as Marian in The Music Man, George Bailey’s wife Mary in It’s A Wonderful Life, and Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set as well as more sophisticated images (Lucien’s Library in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the monastery library in The Name of the Rose and the amazing library at Hogwarts. Songs are also mentioned, including Jimmy Buffett’s “Love in the Library”, and Tori Amos’s album Tales of a Librarian with tracks arranged in the Dewey Decimal System. Check out some of these films from the EPL Library collection and enjoy the entire article here.

Laura

Gallery Shopping for Art – So 20th Century

August 7, 2013

Looking for that special painting for your living room wall? – try Amazon’s new fine art site Amazon Art. Including more than 150 galleries and dealers from New York, Miami, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Canada, the site allows customers to purchase original art ranging from a “$10 screen print by the up-and-comer Ryan Humphrey to a $4.85 million painting by Norman Rockwell.” The current listings also include a $1.4 million painting by French impressionist Claude Monet called: “L’Enfant a la tasse, portrait de Jean Monet.” According to vice president for the Amazon Marketplace “Amazon Art gives galleries a way to bring their passion and expertise about the artists they represent to our millions of customers”, But not all gallery owners are flocking to sign up. Patricia Bransten, director of one of San Francisco’s most respected galleries said that “unlike books or wine, people like to look at art in person before they buy it.” Check out these articles from the NYT and NPR, as well as customer comments on the Monet painting: “Is there a Kindle edition available,” asked one reviewer; Pros include “Looks good above my toilet” and “Fast shipping,”

Laura