books and authors Archives - Page 2 of 8

America's New Poet Laureate

June 16, 2014

The Library of Congress announced that 78-year-old Charles Wright will be named the next poet laureate this week. A retired professor at the University of Virginia, he has already won almost all prizes in the poetry world, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Upon learning of his new post, he told NPR: “I’ll probably stay here at home and think about things.” Librarian of Congress James Billington chose Mr. Wright for his poetry’s “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility”, saying his work offers “an infinite array of beautiful words reflected with constant freshness.” Ancient of Days is from Caribou his latest collection of poetry published in March:

This is an old man’s poetry, written by someone who’s spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.

Read more of his poetry in these articles from the NYTimes and NPR. And check the EPL catalog for his works.

Laura

Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

June 5, 2014

This prestigious prize honoring English-language works by women was awarded Wednesday in London to Irish author Eimear McBride for her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Among 20 other nominated authors, including Donna Tartt for The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries, Ms. McBride wrote the book when she was 27 and spent almost 10 years trying to get it published. She described her writing style as an attempt to capture “the moment just before language becomes formatted thought.” Chairwoman of the judging panel Helen Fraser called her book “an amazing first novel that impressed the judges with its inventiveness and energy.” See more in the npr and NYTimes articles.

Laura

A Perfect "Cover Up" At The Morgan Library

June 2, 2014

A new exhibit at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum features book jackets, first editions, galley proofs, and manuscripts from the Carter Burden Collection. Considered the book jackets’ golden age, the exhibition includes book covers from The Great Gatsby, Light in August, and Herzog as well as first edition copies of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. The nearly 100 items in this literary exhibit were originally purchased by Carter Burden (a former NY City councilman) who began collecting in 1973 by acquiring Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and had “assembled the greatest collection of modern American literature in private hands.” You can read more about this “feast of first editions” in the NYTimes article here.

Laura

Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

May 28, 2014

86-year-old poet and activist Maya Angelou died Tuesday at her home in Winston Salem, N.C. Born Marguerite Johnson, she grew up in St. Louis, Mo. and Stamps, Ark. and was first called Maya by her brother. Leaving a troubled childhood and a segregated South, she began a career as both dancer and singer, touring Europe in the 1950s in a production of Porgy and Bess. She also studied dance with Martha Graham and performed with Alvin Ailey. Patrick Henry Bass, an editor at Essence Magazine, talked about her unique voice: “You would hear that voice, and that voice would capture a humanity, and that voice would calm you in so many ways through some of the most significant challenges.” The first of her series of memoirs I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings revealed some of the “scars of her past”. Film director John Singleton who used Ms. Angelou’s poems in his film Poetic Justice said he remembers the effect her poem Still I Rise had on him: “It makes me feel better about myself, or at least made me feel better about myself when I was young.” The poem begins with these lines:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Read the entire articles from NPR and from the NYT here. And check out the EPL catalog for the many works by this acclaimed author.

Laura

British Author Mary Stewart Dies at 97

May 20, 2014

Mary Stewart, British writer best known for her trilogy of Merlin books died May 9 at her home in Scotland. The Crystal Cave, first in the trilogy, was published in 1970. But Ms. Stewart had already written more than a dozen novels, including The Moon-Spinners, Nine Coaches Waiting, and The Gabriel Hounds. After reading History of the Kings of Britain, “she was inspired to retell the story of King Arthur as seen by Merlin, the king’s adviser and house magician.” In a 1989 interview Ms. Stewart sympathized with the women of that time, saying: “Don’t forget what a dreadful life these medieval women must have led. Shut up in those ghastly castles while the men were away having fun. Nothing to do but your embroidery and play at ball in the garden” Named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1968, she was also given a lifetime achievement award by the Scottish Parliament in 2006. You can read the entire NYT article here. And check the EPL catalog for more of her works.

Laura

Food For Thought

May 16, 2014

A small blurb on NPR’s website mentions that author Jonathan Safran Foer has teamed with Chipotle to feature stories by Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, George Saunders, etc. on their bags and cups. He had the idea while eating a burrito at Chipotle one day with nothing to read. In his Vanity Fair interview, he said: “I tried to put together a somewhat eclectic group, in terms of styles. I wanted some that were essayistic, some fiction, some things that were funny, and somewhat provoking.” Asked if he had any reservations about working with Chipotle because of his criticism of the meat industry, Foer said: “what interested me is the 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries or bookstores.”

Laura

2014 Edgar Awards

May 6, 2014

The 2014 Edgar awards were presented last week in New York to honor best mystery writing in fiction, nonfiction, and television. William Kent Krueger’s novel Ordinary Grace, “about a man’s look back at the summer of 1961 in Minnesota”, won the award for best fiction. Other winners include The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower for best nonfiction; Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews for best first novel by an American author; Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood for best paperback original; and episode one of The Fall by Allan Cubitt for best television teleplay. Read the rest of the NYT article here. You can see a complete list of winners and nominees at theedgars.com.

Laura

2014 Miguel de Cervantes Prize

April 23, 2014

Author Elena Poniatowska has won this year’s Cervantes Prize. The 82-year old reporter and activist has written more than three dozen books, including novels, essays, children’s books and nonfiction. “The daughter of French-Polish immigrants to Mexico, Poniatowska began her career writing for the newspaper Excelsior. In an interview with the Madrid newspaper El Pais, she recounted how the painter Diego Rivera called her the little Polish girl who asks too many questions.” You can read the entire article here – and check the EPL catalog for her works in both Spanish and English.

Laura

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1927-2014

April 17, 2014

Nobel-Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez died today in Mexico City at age 87. The Colombian novelist “widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century,” was a master of the literary genre magic realism. In a 1984 interview with NPR, he said his writing was forever shaped by the grandparents who raised him as a young child:

“There was a real dichotomy in me because, on one hand … there was the world of my grandfather; a world of stark reality, of civil wars he told me about…. And then, on the other hand, there was the world of my grandmother, which was full of fantasy, completely outside of reality.”

His 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which poet Pablo Neruda called “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote” established him as a literary giant. Both the New York Times and NPR have in-depth coverage. And check out the EPL catalog for works by this revered author.

Laura

2014 Pulitzer Prize Winners

April 16, 2014

This year’s Pulitzer Prize Winners were announced Monday at New York’s Columbia University. The prizes honoring excellence in journalism and the arts have been awarded since 1917. This year’s recipients include The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt in the Fiction category; The Flick by Annie Baker for Drama; The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor for History; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall for Biography; Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin for General Nonfiction; 3 Sections by Vijay Sesadri for Poetry. For a list of all the winners and finalists see this NYT article.

Laura