Movies have previews. Why not books?
Yesterday, the Avon Books division of HarperCollins Publishers released a short promo video for Julia Quinn’s soon-to-be-released novel, What Happens in London. The promo is so professionally done, I would probably have commented on it even if best-selling novelist Quinn (her last book hit #1 on The New York Times [...]
wild turkey tracks
This short piece, from the Opinion page of The New York Times (2/2/09), is unpretentious, evocative writing. Read it aloud…slowly.
Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke [...]
“Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” —Philip Nolan in “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale (short story, 1863)
Democrat Joe Lieberman, eight years ago, was denied the vice presidency by suspect Republican counting. Independent Joe Lieberman, two years ago, unwilling to accept rejection in [...]
From the RWA website:
Romance Writers of America proudly sponsors the romance-publishing industry’s highest award of distinction — the RITA Award. RITA awards are presented annually to the best published romance novels of the year. The award itself is a golden statuette named after RWA’s first president, Rita Clay Estrada, and has become the symbol for [...]
RWA’s authors
Armadas of publishing house execs, editors, and marketing staffers, agents working and being worked, 500 or so published authors, even more wannabes, and lots of book-toting and book-buying fans converged on SF’s Marriott Hotel for the RWA’s yearly conference.
Romance books account for more than half of all paperback sales in the U.S., and according [...]
Stevenson’s honeymoon cabin in Calistoga
Do students still read Robert Louis Stevenson? Treasure Island? The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Or have cinema and television overtaken literature, the adaptation become the source, and the source forgotten?
Stevenson was a mainstay of my childhood, a lingering consequence of his immense Victorian [...]
Aristotle
I have, in my dotage, become a Peripatetic (derived from Greek… literally “ones walking around”). The Peripatetic School was founded by Aristotle in 335 BC, so I am far from a charter member, but as with philosophy, striding about—especially to high places—affords one a wider view of the world.
