From the BBC: J.K. Rowling’s house in Scotland has been sold for more than 2.25 million pounds.
Archive for the ‘People’ Category
Rowling house: Sold!
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012Inspiring cats
Monday, November 12th, 2012
From 
Four more years
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
Says it all.
Scotiabank Giller Prize
Friday, November 2nd, 2012From the Associated Press:
TORONTO (AP) — Will Ferguson has won one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards for a novel about a Canadian family’s entanglement in a Nigerian email scan. Ferguson won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book “419” on Tuesday. A kilt-wearing Ferguson pulled out a flask during his acceptance speech and raised a toast to the written word.
The $50,000 Giller prize honors Canadian fiction. Past winners have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro. The Giller was created in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. It honors the best in Canadian fiction.
Ghostwriters
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012
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From Mental Floss: Six famous ghostwriters. My favorite (not on their list) is Ohio’s own Mildred Wirt Benson (1905-2002), who wrote many, many books, including some of the Nancy Drew books, under the name of Carolyn Keene.
Whiting Awards
Thursday, October 25th, 2012From the Los Angeles Times: The 2012 Whiting Awards, presented by the Whiting Foundation, have been given out to 10 authors.
Carl Sagan on books
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
From Brain Pickings:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan
Booker 2 for Mantel
Friday, October 19th, 2012From Shelf Awareness:
Hilary Mantel became the first woman and the first British writer to win the £50,000 (US$80,502) Man Booker Prize twice when she was honored Tuesday night for her novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Mantel also won in 2009 for Wolf Hall. Australian Peter Carey and South African J.M. Coetzee are the other double Booker winners.
“Well, I don’t know. You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize… two come along at once,” said Mantel in her acceptance speech. She is currently working on a third volume, The Mirror and the Light, and called the award “an act of faith and a vote of confidence.”
Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of the Booker judges, praised the novel as “a very remarkable piece of English prose that transcends the work already written by a great English prose writer…. This is a bloody story about the death of Anne Boleyn, but Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her power of prose to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life.” …
Your name is Xvkjlvr? Pronounced how?
Wednesday, October 17th, 2012
From TeachingBooks.Net: Authors reveal how their names are pronounced. Shown: Jon Scieszka.
Nobel Prize for Literature
Thursday, October 11th, 2012
Chinese writer Mo Yan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Publishers Weekly discusses his work.
NBA finalists
Thursday, October 11th, 2012From Shelf Awareness:
Finalists for the 2012 National Book Awards:
Fiction
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco)
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown)
Nonfiction
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Random House)
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 by Robert A. Caro (Knopf)
The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez (Lyons Press)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Poetry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press)
Heavenly Bodies by Cynthia Huntington (Southern Illinois University Press)
Fast Animal by Tim Seibles (Etruscan Press)
Night of the Republic by Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Meme by Susan Wheeler (University of Iowa Press)
Young People’s Literature
Goblin Secrets by William Alexander (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
Out of Reach by Carrie Arcos (Simon Pulse)
Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick (Balzer + Bray)
Endangered by Eliot Schrefer (Scholastic)
Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin (Flash Point/Roaring Brook)
Not just any real estate
Thursday, October 4th, 2012
From The Telegraph: J.K. Rowling’s home in Edinburgh, Scotland, is up for sale. Click through for more photos.
BBC interview with J.K. Rowling
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012
From the BBC, an interview with J.K. Rowling about her recently published novel, The Casual Vacancy. A few excerpts:
“… that is what the Casual Vacancy is. It is a parochial – literally – novel that’s looking at slicing through a society, with everything that that implies. That’s what I wanted to do.
“,,, I always know way more than I need to know. I have backstory on every character that I didn’t need. And, in fact, some of it was in the novel and I took it out. I just need to know much more than the reader does.
“… this is definitely a stand-alone book. I loved writing it but it’s a discrete story, it’s done. I’m not keen to leap into another series.
“… I think it very likely that the next thing I publish will be for kids. I have a children’s book that I really like, it’s for slightly younger children than the Potter books, and I think probably the next thing will be for children. I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind. But I wanted to write this as well.”
(AP Photo)
2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Monday, October 1st, 2012From a press release:
Celebrating the power of literature to promote peace and global understanding, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation today announced that The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak and To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild are the winners of the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and nonfiction, respectively. The foundation also announced this year’s runners-up: Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin and Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo.
Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. Winners receive a $10,000 honorarium while runners-up receive $1,000.
Organizers previously announced that author Tim O’Brien will be the recipient of the 2012 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, formerly known as the Lifetime Achievement Award and renamed last year in honor of the celebrated U.S. diplomat. For forty years, O’Brien has drawn on his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War to create a virtuosic body of work that includes The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and Going After Cacciato.
Winners will be honored at a ceremony hosted by award-winning journalist Nick Clooney on Sunday, November 11th at the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton, Ohio.
In The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press), first-time novelist Andrew Krivak tells the story of Jozef Vinich who returns with his father from a 19th-century Colorado mining town to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary only to be uprooted again by World War I. Nominated for a National Book Award, the novel recreates a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans fought on the same side in the most brutal war to date, and evokes the longing for the American dream amid the unfolding tragedy in Europe. “The Sojourn came out of the stories my grandmother and my mother (her name was Irene, which means ‘peace’) told of a time and a place in ‘the old country’ during the Great War, when peace was not easily found, yet men and women lived and died hoping for it. So when I sat down to write my first novel, I decided that it would be a story about that war, but also about that peace, and those small acts of surrender in people’s lives that become profound moments of salvation,” said Krivak. “To have this small act of a book honored with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize is humbling, and beyond my greatest expectations.”
In To End All Wars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Adam Hochschild brings World War I to life as never before by focusing on the long-ignored critics of the conflict, which is now considered one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage. In a suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Hochschild captures the riveting accounts of Britain’s war protesters, many of whom were intimately connected to their enemy hawks and the war’s generals and heroes. With hundreds of military cemeteries now filled with the millions who died in “the war to end all wars,” the book asks if we can ever avoid repeating history. In The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.” “Almost every war begins with the expectation of a swift and easy victory that will solve a problem. Seldom does this happen. This was the illusion that drove the world into war in 1914, and that has driven the United States into two disastrous wars in the last decade,” said Hochschild. “Can we learn from history? I hope so–that’s why I keep writing it.”
The 2012 runners-up:
- Fiction: Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books): The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.
- Nonfiction: Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo (Free Press): Day of Honey is a beautifully written, fiercely intelligent memoir exploring the heightened resonance of cooking in war-torn Baghdad and Beirut.
To be eligible for the 2012 awards, English-language books must have been published or translated into English in 2011 and address the theme of peace on a variety of levels, such as between individuals, among families and communities, or among nations, religions, or ethnic groups.
A panel of prominent writers, including Christopher Cerf, Alan Cheuse, Kenneth McClane, and April Smith, reviewed the 2012 finalists and selected this year’s winners and runners-up. A full list of the 2012 finalists can be found at: http://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/2012-finalists.htm.
Presidential campaign books
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
From the Los Angeles Times: 12 essential books on presidential campaigns
Right-wing fantasies about the president
Thursday, September 20th, 2012
“At the time of this writing, … large numbers of right-wing Americans are lost in fantasies about President Barack Obama. Obama is a stealth Muslim (one-third of conservative Republicans believed this as of August 2010, along with 20 to 25 percent of Americans generally). Obama was not born in the United States (45 percent of Republicans). Obama is a communist who is actively trying to destroy America. Obama wants to set up Nazi-style death panels to euthanize old people. Obama is the Antichrist (in a controversial Harris Poll, 24 percent of Republicans endorsed the statement that Obama “might” be the Antichrist).”
— The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
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Good lord, and they think WE’RE crazy.
— M.L.
The First Lady
Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
Michelle Obama on iCarly. I just like the picture. Is she beautiful, or what?
Authors’ hobbies
Friday, August 31st, 2012From Flavorwire: Surprising hobbies of famous authors
Women authors earning more
Monday, August 13th, 2012James Patterson tops Forbes’s list of high-paid authors, but this year’s list includes six women in the top 15:
- James Patterson ($94 million)
- Stephen King ($39 million)
- Janet Evanovich ($33 million)
- John Grisham ($26 million)
- Jeff Kinney ($25 million)
- Bill O’Reilly ($24 million)
- Nora Roberts ($23 million)
- Danielle Steel ($23 million)
- Suzanne Collins ($20 million)
- Dean Koontz ($19 million)
- J.K. Rowling ($17 million)
- George R.R. Martin ($15 million)
- Stephenie Meyer ($14 million)
- Ken Follett ($14 million)
- Rick Riordan ($13 million)
R.I.P. Gore Vidal
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
“Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”
— Gore Vidal
Maeve Binchy dies at 72
Tuesday, July 31st, 2012
I’m so sad to report that the wonderful author Maeve Binchy has died at 72. Her Irish books were among my favorites. Here are some tributes:
‘Encyclopedia Brown’ author dies
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Donald J. Sobol, the author of the “Encyclopedia Brown” series, has died.
From Entertainment Weekly: “The Encyclopedia Brown series centers on Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown, a boy detective nicknamed for his vast knowledge of facts, who helps his police chief father solve local cases, usually by dinner time. Sobol came up with the concept when he came across a book by chance at the New York Public Library. The book had puzzles on one side of the page and solutions on the other, and it occurred to him to write a mystery book in the same style.”
From The Boston Globe: “The Encyclopedia Brown books also featured Brown’s friend and detective partner, the tough and athletic Sally Kimball. John Sobol said his father was ahead of his times in creating a strong female character. ‘That was groundbreaking back in 1963 when the series was first published,’ Sobol said. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Encyclopedia Brown series. Donald Sobol’s latest Encyclopedia Brown adventure, ‘Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Soccer Scheme,’ will be published in October, according to a release from Penguin.”
Writers in films
Thursday, July 12th, 2012
From The Millions: Did you know some famous writers made cameo appearance in films that had nothing to do with their writing?
Jane Austen ring for sale
Tuesday, July 10th, 2012
From Time.com: Jane Austen’s mysterious ring, and other Austen paraphernalia, will be auctioned in Dublin.
UPDATE: The ring was sold at auction for 152,450 pounds ($236,557) this week, more than five times its pre-sale estimate, Sotheby’s said.
Writers’ retreats
Tuesday, July 10th, 2012
From The Huffington Post: A slide show of famous-writers’ retreats.
Man interviews 12-year-old self
Friday, July 6th, 2012
This is wonderful! From the Herald Sun: A video of filmmaker Jeremiah McDonald interviewing his 12-year-old self. Funny!
Awesome authors
Thursday, July 5th, 2012From Flavorwire: 10 famous authors whose lives would make awesome books. Well, duh, Marquis de Sade, for one.
R.I.P. Nora Ephron
Wednesday, June 27th, 2012
In memory of the late Nora Ephron, Lists of Note reproduces
Ephron’s own lists of what she will and won’t miss.
Funny drunk texts
Wednesday, June 27th, 2012Funny: The Paris Review imagines drunk texts from famous authors.
China’s first woman in space
Monday, June 18th, 2012
From Tor.com: Liu Yang becomes China’s first woman in space. You go, girl!