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July 25, 2008 1:18:48 PM CDT

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Stories related to: literature

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  • July 2008

    • An Outsider Becomes Poet Laureate

      newser  |  New York Times  |  Jul 17, 08 7:54 AM CDT

      An Outsider Becomes Poet Laureate

      Kay Ryan, a poet from Fairfax, Calif., with a reputation as an individualist, has been chosen as the nation's new poet laureate. The 62-year-old writer is known for her sly, concise verse that incorporates plays on words and uses intricate rhyme structures. Despite receiving many of the field's highest accolades, Ryan remains something of an outsider, writes the New York Times . More »

      Tags

      literature  • poetry  • National Endowment for the Arts  • poet laureate

    • Midnight's Children Wins Best of Bookers

      newser  |  Guardian (UK)  |  Jul 13, 08 5:04 PM CDT

      Midnight's Children Wins Best of Bookers

      Salman Rushdie's classic Midnight's Children , which nabbed the Booker Prize 27 years ago, has now won the Best of the Bookers by public vote, the Guardian reports. About a boy born at the hour of India's independence, the novel won over six previous prize winners. The prize "looks at what qualities of books survive" their "temporary celebrity," said one judge. More »

      Tags

      India  • literature  • fiction  • novel  • Booker Prize  • Salman Rushdie  • Gandhi

    • Bard-Working Librarians Help Nab Book Thief

      newser  |  Washington Post  |  Jul 11, 08 4:29 PM CDT

      Bard-Working Librarians Help Nab Book Thief

      Quick-thinking librarians have helped recover a valuable book of Shakespeare's works stolen from a British university 10 years ago, the Washington Post reports. A man who arrived unannounced at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library with a copy of the 1623 First Folio set off "alarm bells" with his tale of the $2.5 million volume's provenance, says a library official. More »

      Tags

      literature  • theft  • William Shakespeare

    • Anne of Green Gables, at 100, Goes Legit

      newser  |  Slate  |  Jul 10, 08 12:31 PM CDT

      Anne of Green Gables, at 100, Goes Legit

      Impetuous redheaded orphan Anne of Green Gables got the biggest gift of all on her 100th birthday: Official introduction into the literary canon. The Modern Library will issue a centennial edition of the first book in the series of eight. Some scholars bristle at the decision to place Anne alongside Huck Finn and Anna Karenina, dubbing the novels sentimental and their readers nostalgic, but Meghan O’Rourke comes to her defense on Slate. More »

      Tags

      book  • literature  • Canon  • young adult  • young adult novel

    • Wife Shouldn't Worry Laura Bush: Dowd

      newser  |  New York Times  |  Jul 9, 08 1:11 PM CDT

      Wife Shouldn't Worry Laura Bush: Dowd

      Words like "smear" and "gossip" have flown around American Wife , the novel probing the secret life of Laura Bush, but the book itself is pretty harmless, Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times . Kings and queens have always inspired art, Dowd notes, and Wife isn’t sensationalist—it’s a well-researched attempt to get inside a guarded but intriguing figure. More »

      Tags

      White House  • sex  • literature  • first lady  • Laura Bush  • book reviews  • Curtis Sittenfeld

    • Obama as Writer: He's the 'Real Deal'

      newser  |  New Republic  |  Jul 8, 08 2:37 PM CDT

      Obama as Writer: He's the 'Real Deal'

      If it's true that the style is the man, then it makes sense, literary critic Andrew Delbanco writes in the New Republic , to take the measure of Barack Obama from his memoirs. Taking a tour of Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope , Delbanco finds a bit of overwriting, a propensity for cinematic flourishes, a sensitivity to the complexities of character, and an ability to use local details to "open out into universal experience." More »

      Tags

      Barack Obama  • literature  • Abraham Lincoln  • leadership

    • 'Laura Bush' No Conservative in New Novel

      newser  |  Radar  |  Jul 7, 08 4:44 PM CDT

      'Laura Bush' No Conservative in New Novel

      In a new book unlikely to top the presidential reading list, author Curtis Sittenfeld fictionalizes the story of Laura Bush. Radar got a sneak peek and calls the novel "a masterful highbrow-lowbrow mash-up." The narrator is a librarian who falls in love with a future president upon seeing his crotch, undergoes an abortion, and has steamy sex with the brother of her high school sweetheart (who dies in a car crash she causes). More »

      Tags

      sex  • literature  • abortion  • lesbians  • Laura Bush  • Curtis Sittenfeld

    • Is Something Rotten in the Bard's Works?

      newser  |  NPR  |  Jul 6, 08 12:37 PM CDT

      Is Something Rotten in the Bard's Works?

      Did William Shakespeare really write the plays attributed to him? The question remains the subject of an intense academic debate, NPR reports. Those who doubt the “man from Stratford” penned his plays point to a lame rhyming epitaph on the supposed bard’s headstone, and to lack of documents tying him to his works—or even suggesting he was a writer. More »

      Tags

      literature  • theater  • William Shakespeare  • play  • academics  • skeptics

  • June 2008

    • That's Sir Salman Rushdie

      newser  |  Associated Press  |  Jun 25, 08 12:54 PM CDT

      That's Sir Salman Rushdie

      Queen Elizabeth officially knighted Salman Rushdie today, the AP reports, a year after the award was announced to widespread Muslim protest. “I have no regrets about any of my work,” said Rushdie, when asked about his novel The Satanic Verses, for which the Shah of Iran awarded him a “death sentence” and forced him into hiding. No cameras were allowed at the knighting, which the 61-year-old described as a “private moment.” More »

      Tags

      literature  • Queen Elizabeth II  • Salman Rushdie  • knighthood  • Satanic Verses

    • Christian Novel Outstrips Oprah Pick

      newser  |  New York Times  |  Jun 24, 08 9:16 AM CDT

      Christian Novel Outstrips Oprah Pick

      Once rejected by multiple mainstream publishers, the slim Christian novel The Shack is flying off shelves, topping the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. “Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” says one devotee. The Times looks at a blockbuster built around an unconventional depiction of God—as a jolly black woman named “Papa.” More »

      Tags

      religion  • book  • literature  • Christianity  • best seller

    • Sentences That 'Evoke an Entire Universe'

      newser  |  Esquire  |  Jun 22, 08 7:32 PM CDT

      Sentences That 'Evoke an Entire Universe'

      Celebrating 75 years of fiction, Esquire offers some samples from "writers who could evoke an entire universe with a single sentence." A smattering: "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well," Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro , August, 1936. More »

      Tags

      literature  • Ernest Hemingway

    • 'Realish' Sedaris Book Skirts Memoir Scrutiny

      newser  |  New York Times  |  Jun 8, 08 10:45 AM CDT

      'Realish' Sedaris Book Skirts Memoir Scrutiny

      With his new book of nonfiction essays, Engulfed in Flames , David Sedaris finds himself engulfed in questions of truth and accuracy. In America, the recent explosion of memoirs has been followed with one scandal after another, prompting more scrutiny of the humorist’s work. “I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using a nonfiction label," a New Republic writer argued last year. More »

      Tags

      book  • literature  • humor  • memoir  • writer  • nonfiction books  • fake memoirs

  • May 2008

    • Bored at Work? Site Disguises Classic Lit

      newser  |  Wall Street Journal  |  May 30, 08 2:08 PM CDT

      Bored at Work? Site Disguises Classic Lit

      Business world got you down? Want to escape into a classic poem or short story? The New Zealand Book Council has made a website to help you: ReadatWork.com. The site brings up a fake Windows desktop with folders and PowerPoint files, the Wall Street Journal reports. Click on them, and you get classic literature disguised as a business presentation. More »

      Tags

      literature  • website  • reading  • novel  • corporate culture  • office  • poetry

    • Fritzl's Crimes Rooted in Literary History

      newser  |  Times (UK)  |  May 18, 08 8:03 PM CDT

      Fritzl's Crimes Rooted in Literary History

      Josef Fritzl's crimes stunned the world, but such demented patriarchs have long haunted Austrian literature. The dark 1852 story "Turmalin" depicts a deranged husband locking up his daughter; the 1917 novel The Grave of the Living tells of a troubled family and an imprisoned child. "This is the cultural matrix from which Josef Fritzl emerged," writes Ritchie Robertson in the Times Literary Supplement . More »

      Tags

      torture  • literature  • Josef Fritzl  • incest  • Vienna  • patriarchy

    • Famously Bad Poet Fetches Big Bucks at Auction

      newser  |  Wall Street Journal  |  May 17, 08 8:05 AM CDT

      Famously Bad Poet Fetches Big Bucks at Auction

      William McGonagall had a tough time after deciding poetry was his calling, being roundly insulted by critics and even pelted with rotten fruit. But the 19th-century Scotsman has been remembered long after his peers—as the worst poet ever to mangle the English language. His works commanded a price higher than a J.K Rowling first edition at an auction yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reports. More »

      Tags

      literature  • JK Rowling  • Scotland  • poetry

    • Publishers Bank On a 007 Comeback

      newser  |  Wall Street Journal  |  May 8, 08 1:55 PM CDT

      Publishers Bank On a 007 Comeback

      This year is the centenary of author Ian Fleming's birth, but while Daniel Craig gave the James Bond movie franchise a much-needed recharge, sales of the 007 books haven't caught up. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, the Fleming estate has commissioned respected writer Sebastian Faulks to pen a new Bond novel, Devil May Care , with an ambitious first US printing of 250,000.  More »

      Tags

      literature  • publishing  • James Bond  • bookstore  • Barnes and Noble  • Sebastian Faulks  • Ian Fleming

  • April 2008

    • 50 Favorite Cult Books

      newser  |  Daily Telegraph (UK)  |  Apr 27, 08 10:53 AM CDT

      50 Favorite Cult Books

      It’s hard to define the "cult" book, but the Telegraph compiled 50 of the top contenders that “rewire your head.” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968) Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) More »

      Tags

      list  • book  • literature  • Hunter S. Thompson  • Jack Kerouac  • Harper Lee  • To Kill A Mockingbird  • The Catcher in the Rye  • JD Salinger  • Tom Wolfe  • On the Road

    • We Need to Talk ... About Your Books

      newser  |  New York Times  |  Apr 2, 08 6:25 PM CDT

      We Need to Talk ... About Your Books

      Forget toothpaste habits: Sometimes “a missed—or misguided—literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast," writes Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. Pasting your literary acumen all over your MySpace page has become the norm, and not a bad one. Just be prepared when “he hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” becomes a rallying break-up cry. More »

      Tags

      book  • literature  • romance  • relationship

  • March 2008
  • February 2008

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