John Grisham is giving this book away free. https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...d=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-lifestyle:homepage/card I have no idea why some pics are sooooo large. Sorry.
I got a happy bon mot from my non-reading son: a literary reference to A Raisin in the Sun! My folks are coming over today and yesterday as I was cleaning the kitchen floor in preparation I told him that we were going to give my wife a birthday present of a new floor. 15 years ago when I laid the vinyl we thought it would only be there for maybe five years until we redid the kitchen. Well, we bought a boat, added a garage, my son required private education and now my daughter is in college, and well, we've never redone the kitchen. And the floor stopped looking good 5 years ago. Which lead my son to observe that the floor had had all the newness scrubbed out of it and it was looking pretty weary like the apartment in A Raisin in the Sun. He read that play a year and a half ago.... Here's what my son was referring to: Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished, washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room.
The Mass-Market Edition of 'Mockingbird' is Dead - New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/131400/mass-market-edition-kill-mockingbird-dead
2016 Pulitzer Prize awards... Fiction: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press) Drama: Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Grand Central Publishing) History: Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf) Biography or Autobiography: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan (Penguin Press) Poetry: Ozone Journal, by Peter Balakian (University of Chicago Press) General Nonfiction: Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick (Doubleday) Music: In for a Penny, In for a Pound, by Henry Threadgill (Pi Recordings) http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2016 - The Pulitzer Prizes
It's with some embarrassment that I admit my lack of foundational knowledge about Carl Sandburg. Years ago, I once visited the Sandburg home/farm in Flat Rock, NC, which was bucolic and, that that time, under threat of closure due to government budget cuts. That short visit was probably the reason why I decided last week to watch a PBS biography on Sandburg, produced by the program American Masters; I had a little downtime, and a program about an author seemed modestly promising. It ended up being some of the best television I've watched in years, both for the amazing story of Sandburg's life, and the brilliant skills of the filmmakers. Sandburg, I now know, was a monumental American. Do yourself a favor and set aside 90 minutes to watch this: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/carl-sandburg-homepage-the-day-carl-sandburg-died/2267/
Saw it already! I grew up in a house 1.2 miles from Carl Sandburg's birthplace (if google is telling me the truth). He's a much better poet than he is usually given credit for, though he did pretty much exhaust his resources by his third book ... at which time he started collecting American folksongs, writing a couple of pretty decent memoirs, and the multi-volume Lincoln biography that, while limited by a lack of access to resources available to everyone now, is still pretty good (well, I've only read the first two volumes, so it's possible the next four suck)
Whether you’re heading back to campus this year, back to the office or just looking to get back into the swing of things this fall, the Goldman Sachs second annual Back-to-School Reading List features book recommendations for every age and career stage. http://www.goldmansachs.com/careers/blog/posts/2016-reading-list.html
Bob Dylan Awarded 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature - N.Y. Times http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0 LONDON — The singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” in the words of the Swedish Academy. He is the first American to win since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement, in Stockholm, came as something of a surprise. Although Mr. Dylan, 75, has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized. “Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics like the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love,” the Swedish Academy said in a biographical note accompanying the announcement. “The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions, under the title ‘Lyrics.’ As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as painter, actor and scriptwriter.” The academy added: “Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured persistently, an undertaking called the ‘Never-Ending Tour.’ Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature.”
As of now, and I may be convinced otherwise at some point, I'm in the "Oh, for ********'s sake! Are you ********ing kidding me?" camp.
To show Bob Dylan's influence, I'm looking at a "Barron's Review Course Series- Let's Review: U.S. History and Government Third Edition." I'm in New York, where there are Regents Examinations, and I used that book in 2001-2002 (11th grade). One of the Document-Based Question (DBQ) essays (in the review book, I don't think it was from an actual Regents) says: "Historical Context: At different times in the history of the United States, poignant protest against the policies of government and practices of society have been expressed through song. Bob Dylan's lyrics during the 1960s and 1970s addressed numerous issues including civil rights and war." The documents are from: "Masters of War" (1963) "Only a Pawn in Their Game" (1963) "Blowin' in the Wind" (1962) "The Death of Emmett Till" (1963) "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (1963) "Hurricane" (1975)
I think the first won should win the prize. Though all of them do pretty much the opposite of what Viagra is supposed to do.
Horton Foote, who recorded a wistful American adventure through the 20th century, a book or shine 'sidekick
I'm skimming a survey of England's kings and queens by a guy who changed his name to Plantagenet Somerset Fry. I'm trying to decide if he's a genius, or just ludicrous.
That reminds me of this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Rolfe Frederick Rolfe, an eccentric's eccentric, converted ti Catholicism, washed out of the seminary, took to signing himself as Fr. Rolfe anyway. And he had other pen names, most famously Baron Corvo, under which he wrote his most famous book... Hadrian the Seventh (1904), with an original and compelling plot, is Rolfe's most famous novel. Rolfe portrays himself as an Englishman with a quintessentially English name, 'George Arthur Rose,' (after Saint George, King Arthur, and England's national flower) who, having originally been rejected for the priesthood, finds himself the object of a spectacular and highly improbable change of mind on the part of the church hierarchy, who elect him to the papacy. Rose takes the name Hadrian VII and embarks upon a programme of ecclesiastical and geopolitical reform; the only English pope was Hadrian IV, and the last non-Italian pope had been Hadrian VI. More self-indulgently, he takes the opportunity to review his past life and to reward or punish his friends and acquaintances according to what he believes to be their just deserts. Hadrian is thus essentially an exercise in wish-fulfilment.[8] Yeah. I remember that "genius, or just ludicrous" feeling.
2017 Pulitzer Prize winners... Fiction: The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) Drama: Sweat, by Lynn Nottage (Theatre Communications Group) History: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon) Biography or Autobiography: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar (Random House) General Nonfiction: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond (Crown) Poetry: Olio, by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books) Music: Angel's Bone, opera by Du Yun http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2017 - The Pulitzer Prizes
Kazuo Ishiguro Is Awarded Nobel Prize In Literature - N.Y. Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/books/nobel-prize-literature.html The English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, known for his spare yet emotionally resonate prose style and his inventive subversion of literary genres, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his novels, which are often written in the first person, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of The Swedish Academy. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.” He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills, about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan. When he wrote “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure. His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland were conveyed in his third novel, “Remains of the Day” which won the prestigious Booker prize and depicted a buttoned-up butler, who was later immortalized in a film by the same name starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro later said he had written the book in four weeks at the age of 32. A literary iconoclast, Mr. Ishiguro has played with genres like detective fiction, westerns, science fiction and fantasy in his novels. Critics viewed “The Unconsoled,” a surreal, dreamlike novel about a pianist in an unnamed European city, as magical realism when it came out in 1995. “When We Were Orphans” was viewed as a detective novel. His 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go,” was regarded as yet another stylistic leap into futuristic science fiction, although it was set in the 1990s. His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” defied expectations once again. A fantasy story set in Arthurian Britain, the novel centers on an older couple, Axl and Beatrice, who leave their village in search of their missing son, and encounter an old knight. Though the story was a full blown fantasy, with ogres and a dragon, it was also a parable that explored many of the themes that have preoccupied Mr. Ishiguro throughout his career, including the fragile nature of individual and collective memory. In selecting Mr. Ishiguro, the Swedish academy, which has been criticized in the past for using the prize to make a political statement, seemed to be focused on pure literary merit.
Yeah, I don't know. Ishiguro is a very good writer (obviously) but this strikes me as a compromise, middle of the road pick. I shrug my shoulders....
2018 Pulitzer Prize winners... Fiction: Less, by Andrew Sean Greer (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company) Drama: Cost of Living, by Martyna Majok (New Play Exchange) History: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (Liveright/W.W. Norton) Biography or Autobiography: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books) General Nonfiction: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Poetry: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Music: DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar (Aftermath) www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2018 - The Pulitzer Prizes