This is from an AP report:
Reclusive author Harper Lee attended a high school play based on her book, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” on Wednesday, then met with students who appeared in the production.
What next? J.D. Salinger book signing? or Thomas Pynchon writing liner notes on an album? Oh, wait, he already did that with the band Lotion.
So the Sobol award is gone, now here comes a new award contest. Here’s the skinny from Gather.com:
Today, I’m exceptionally excited to announce Gather’s newest writing competition, one of our most promising programs to date: The Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition. First Chapters offers thousands of aspiring, but unpublished, authors the opportunity to win a guaranteed publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, promotion and distribution by Borders, and a $5,000 cash prize from Gather.com. This competition will launch the career of one talented Gather member and introduce many others to the industry.
Maybe this contest will actually work.
On of the book blogs I check out often is Of Books and Bicycles. In a recent post, Of Books responds to a post on a different blog — BlogLily — about book reviewing and feeling sheepish about criticizing someone who has put so much work into a book AND has gotten it published. A worthy read, of course, would be the list of rules for reviewers that John Updike wrote and is now posted at the blog of the National Book Critics Circle (I am member of the organization, by the way). But it is also good to review the words of HL Menken:
A book review, first and foremost, must be entertaining. By this I mean that it must be dexterously written, and show an interesting personality. The justice of the criticism embodied in it is a secondary matter. It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to determine definitely whether a given book is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The notion to the contrary is a delusion of the defectively intelligent. It is almost always accompanied by moral passion. But a critic may at least justify himself by giving his readers civilized entertainment …. If he is a well-informed man and able to write decently, anything he writes about anything will divert his readers.
In a story out of Bellingham, Wash., today (where I had my first job in journalism, by the way, at the Bellingham Herald) is a piece about the evolving nature of book clubs.
Here’s the link to the story, and here’s a sample:
In the world of literature, writers shouldn’t have to pay editors or agents to read their work, and that seems to be behind the failure of the $100,000 Sobol award, as reported by the AP:
Former Times Union reporter, author and visiting scholar at The Sage Colleges Christopher Ringwald has a new book, “A Day Apart: How Jews, Christians, and Muslims Find Faith, Freedom, and Joy on the Sabbath,” which is now available from Oxford University Press.
The book received a STARRED review in the January issue of Booklist, which called it “a valuable contribution to interfaith studies.”
In conjunction with the book, Ringwald also will be holding various public events:
This blog is based in faraway Houston, Texas, but it is written by Patrick Kurp, a former Times Union reporter:
http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/
He bills his blog as “A blog about the intersection of books and life. ”
Take a look.
If you’ve followed my book reviews, you’ll know that I have an interest in Japanese literature, so here’ a link to an interesting article published in Japan reflects on the importance of Haruki Murakami’s work in East Asia. The article is here. (A tip of the hat to the literary blog The Elegant Variation for pointing it out.) Here’s an excerpt:
“Resonating with the thoughts of the times, Murakami is challenging universal issues of mankind such as history and morality, and is expected to increase his presence in an East Asian region in transition.”
The New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany announces its Spring 2007 schedule of visiting writers. The big names include Richard Ford, Leslie Marmon Silko, Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Kammen, Edward P. Jones, Norman Mailer and Sara Paretsky. Click more below for more details.
