by Michael Janairo

Audiobooks review: “Lisey’s Story”

“Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King. Read by Mare Winningham. Unabridged, 19 hours, 16 CDs. Simon & Schuster. $49.95.

In ancient Greek drama, deus ex machina was used when the plot got so out of control that only divine intervention could resolve it. “Lisey’s Story” is the opposite.

Lisey is the widow of a famous author still dealing with grief two years after his death. Her loneliness is convincing, as is the magical place — Boo’ya Moon — where her husband found inspiration and confronted horrors.

What bedevils the plot, though, is an insane stalker who terrorizes Lisey for her husband’s papers. This one-dimensional, inexplicable character clearly arrives for some anti-divine intervention to create chaos. King, however, eventually keeps the plot tidy and unsurprising.

Winningham does a winning job of conveying Lisey’s melancholy as well as other characters’ madness.

Official Stephen King Web site.

by Michael Janairo

Black History Month: “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

eyeswatchinggod.jpg
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937).

This novel from the Harlem Renaissance has gained in popularity in the last 30 years or so, since Alice Walker wrote an essay called “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.”

From the Zora Neale Hurston Web site:

The epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life’s joys and sorrows, and come home to herself in peace. Her passionate story prompted Alice Walker to say, “There is no book more important to me than this one.”

When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. Out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue in paperback edition by the University of Illionois Press in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man’s mule or adornment. Though Jaine’s story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn’t have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done “two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The novel also has been selected this year for the NEA’s Big Read, which libraries in the Capital Region will be taking part in. For information, go to http://www.neabigread.org/books/theireyes/theireyes07.php

You may also be interested in the following events:
The Big Read
May 4 (Friday): Biographer and scholar Lucy Anne Hurston
An Afternoon With Lucy Anne Hurston – 2:00 p.m., Guilderland Public Library, 2228 Western Avenue, Guilderland
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (United States, 2005, 98 minutes, color, DVD) film screening followed by commentary by Lucy Anne Hurston – 7:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus Lucy Anne Hurston, niece of major 20th century writer Zora Neale Hurston, is the author of the remarkable multimedia biography, “Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston” (2004), which consists of text, photographs, a CD, and various pieces of removable memorabilia.
Cosponsored by the Upper Hudson Library System as part of “The Big Read,”an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest.

Barbara Smith also recommends these books:

Albany Public Library
The Big Read
May 4-June 3, 2007

If you liked Their Eyes Were Watching God, you might also enjoy…..

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd

Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Lucy Hurston

*Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

*The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. DuBois

Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales From the Gulf State by Zora Neale Hurston
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

Beloved by Toni Morrison
*The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
*Sula by Toni Morrison

Miss Muriel and Other Stories by Ann Petry
*The Street by Ann Petry

Cane by Jean Toomer

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
*In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker

*Black Boy by Richard Wright
Native Son by Richard Wright

Here’s a previous post on the Big Read.

Thanks especially to Barbara Smith, author and Albany Common Council member, for her recommendations for this post, and others. Also to Lisa Stevens, my co-worker, and Eleanor at Flights of Fantasy, for their contributions. You were all very helpful.

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
Sonia Sanchez
“Black Girl in the Ring” by Nola Hopkinson
June Jordan
“Flight to Canada” by Ishmael Reed
Gloria Naylor
“Fledgling” by Octavia E. Butler
Chester Himes
“Apex Hides the Hurt” by Colson Whitehead

by Michael Janairo

LibriVox releases horror story collection

Dickens, Doyle, Lovecraft are among the names of LibriVox’s latest release. The link is here.

LibriVox is a volunteer effort that takes works in the public domain and records them as free audiofiles.

More about LibriVox is here.

by Michael Janairo

Hear the Story Prize finalists

on WNYC public radio’s Philip Lopate show. The link is here:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/02/27

The winner of the Story Prize — for the top collection of short stories published in 2006 — will be announced tonight.

by Michael Janairo

Audiobook review: “Echo Park”

“Echo Park” by Michael Connelly. Read by Len Cariou. Unabridged, 10.5 hours, 9 CDs. Hachette Audio. $39.98.

Connelly succeeds once again with his latest Detective Harry Bosch thriller, the second one to feature the L.A. cop working in the Open-Unsolved Unit. This time, a killer caught with body parts in his van agrees to confess to seven other killings, including that of Marie Gesto. She’s a woman who had disappeared 13 years before in a case that Bosch never solved.

Bosch doesn’t believe the new confession, especially since the suspect isn’t the man who has been a “person of interest” over the years.

When the suspect leads a heavily armed group of police and lawyers deep into the woods to show them Marie’s body, things go terribly wrong and the novel’s suspense only deepens.

What makes this book among Connelly’s best is its realism and its patience, as it moves logically through police procedures and Bosch’s decision-making process.

Cariou’s tough, assured performance proves why he is the definitive voice of Harry Bosch.

The novel’s official Web site — including audio excerpts — is here.

by Michael Janairo

Events on Wednesday, Feb. 28

From Christopher D. Ringwald’s A DAY APART press release:

Ringwald is a journalist (and a former Times Union reporter) and educator based as a visiting scholar at The Sage Colleges in Albany, NY. A DAY APART has been hailed by Asma Gull Hassan as “a solemn, brilliant call to multi-faith commonalities and by Solomon Schimmel as “illuminating and inspiring.”

(Oxford University Press, Jan. 2007; Aly Mostel, publicist, 212 726-6111)

Lecture by author with responses by Jewish and Muslim clerics (invited). Wednesday, February 28, 2007, 7p.m. Bush Memorial, Russell Sage College, Troy, NY (Bush is a former church at First and Congress streets)

by Michael Janairo

Story Prize to be announced tonight in NYC

The Story Prize will be returning to the New School’s Tishman Auditorium on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. for our third annual awards event.

The three authors chosen as Story Prize finalists will read brief selections from their books and then sit down with Larry Dark, the Director of The Story Prize, to discuss their work onstage. The readings will provide the audience with a taste of the nominated books, while the onstage interviews will provide insight into the creative process of the finalists. The evening will culminate with the announcement of the winner and presentation of the $20,000 award and the engraved silver bowl given to the winner of The Story Prize. The runners-up will receive $5,000 each.

The Story Prize is an annual book award for short story collections written in English and published in the U.S. during a calendar year. Finalists chosen from among books published in 2006 will be announced during the second week of January, 2007. Ticket information and a short list of other highly recommended books of short fiction published in 2006 will be posted on our Web site, www.thestoryprize.org, at the time of the announcement, so be sure to stay tuned.

by Michael Janairo

First Amazon, Google, now publishers …

… are making it possible to search inside the content of books.

Here’s the story from AP:

NEW YORK (AP) … Random House Inc. has made online excerpts available from books by Toni Morrison, Calvin Trillin and thousands of others as publishers continue their push to sell more books through the Internet.

The Random House search and browser program, Insight, was officially launched Tuesday.

“We believe Insight will be an invaluable marketing tool for our publishers, our authors, and particularly our booksellers, as book content sampling frequently is followed by consumer purchase,” Andrew Weber, Random House’s senior vice president for perations and technology, said in a statement.

Earlier this week, HarperCollins announced its own Browse Inside “widget” program, with excerpts available from books by Michael Crichton, Sidney Poitier and many others. According to HarperCollins, the new program enables “fans and authors to embed sample pages of their favorite books directly onto social networking sites and blogs.”

“The Browse Inside widget is the most recent marketing tool we have developed using the capabilities of our digital warehouse to market our titles to the MySpace generation online,” HarperCollins Group President Brian Murray said in a statement.

“We are extending our reach beyond the HarperCollins site to where many potential book buyers visit … on social communities, blogs or author sites.”

by Michael Janairo

Esquire’s napkin stories

Talk about fiction for short-attention spans. Esquire sent writers napkins upon which to write short stories. You can see them all here.