Film in "Blume"

June 7, 2013

blumeJudy Blume has been a best-selling author since her first novel Iggie’s House was published in 1970. Although she’s sold more than 80 million books none of them have been produced as a feature film until today. Her 1981 young adult novel Tiger Eyes will open in select theaters around the country – and has already won a jury prize at a film festival screening. Judy Blume’s son Lawrence directed the film and both mother and son wrote the script. It was “a real homemade movie,” according to Lawrence, who thought the book very cinematic when he first read it as an 18-year-old. The story of teenage girl Davey who has to adjust to life in New Mexico after her father is killed stars Willa Holland of “Gossip Girl.” Ms. Blume will be in Chicago this weekend to accept the 2013 ChicagoTribune Young Adult Literary Prize at the Printers Row Literary Festival. See the articles in today’s NYT and Chicago Sun-Times, and check out the library catalog for the many books by the acclaimed author.

Laura




Novelist Chimamanda Adichie Speaks in Chicago

June 11, 2010

Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be at the Harold Washington Library Center/multi-purpose room at 1 p.m. tomorrow, June 12, speaking with Mary Schmich as part of the Printer’s Row Lit Fest. In the video below, she discusses the danger of a single story. Because our lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping stories, she cautions that we risk critical misunderstandings if we hear just one story about another country or person.

Her most recent book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a stunning collection of stories that explores relationships between men and women, classes and cultures, and Nigeria and the United States. She won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her novel, Half A Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria in the late 1960s during the bloody three-year civil war there. Purple Hibiscus is the first novel by Adichie that I read, and it is a searing, sensitive and beautifully written story of one girl’s exploration of faith, family and country.  Read more about author Chimamanda Adichie here.   -Christie
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]


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