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Thieves locked South African Nobel laureate for literature Nadine Gordimer in a store room while they robbed her home. Gordimer, 83, handed over cash and jewelry from a safe but would not give up her wedding ring. Guards arrived half an hour later and released the author.
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L’Ennui (boredom), an unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote during her college years was discovered by a graduate student doing research at Indiana University. The poem was written as Plath was reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and incorporated themes from the book. It will appear in a few days in an online literary journal. Plath, who committed suicide at the age of 30, was married to British poet laureate Ted Hughes.
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Popular Japanese storyteller Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Woodk, Wind-up Bird Chronicle) was recently awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, given annually through the cooperation of the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, Czech Republic. Kafka is said to be a favorite of Murakami since he first read the Czech author’s works as a teenager. Murakami named the leading character of his novel Kafka on the Shore after Franz Kafka to honor him.

According to the organizers, the award is given to authors whose works exhibit “humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, existential, timeless character, generally human validity and ability to hand over a testimony about our times.” Past winners of the award have also received the Nobel Prize for Literature and Murakami has also been said to be a likely candidate for the prestigious prize.

Recently released:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami

Description:
Following the best-selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining.

Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be the closest of all.
About the Author

About the author:
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into thirty-eight languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.

Murakami likes unagi, Smirnoff Vodka, and Radiohead. Learn more about the author from his website.

Google recently launched “The Literacy Project,” a website designed to bring together reading resources for students, educators, and literacy organizations. In it you can find a video using scenes from a Bollywood movie to read along to, academic papers on dyslexia, and links to related web logs. There is also a section showing locations of literacy organizations worldwide.

At the moment, the Philippines has only one entry, the Notre Dame Foundation for Charitable Activities Women in Enterprise Development (WED) in Cotabato City. Hooray for them. Hopefully more local organizations will discover this site and take part in sharing and learning how to combat illiteracy.

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Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk, who last year had charges brought against him by his own government for “insulting Turkishness,” is the first Turkish writer to win the award. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Read about the prize on Aljazeera and more about the author on Wikipedia.
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Winners of the 2006 Quill Book Awards were recently announced with Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings from the Humor category winning Book of the Year. The awards are the first literary prizes to be based on popularity. Winners were chosen through reader votes cast on the MSNBC website.

2006 winners:

• Book of the Year - Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings by Tyler Perry (Humor)
• Debut Author of the Year - Julie Powell for Julie & Julia (Cooking)
• Children’s Chapter Book/Middle Grade - The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
• Young Adult/Teen - Eldest by Christopher Paolini
• General Fiction - A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
• Cooking - Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats: A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners by Rachael Ray
• History/Current Events/Politics - An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore

For a full list of winners, go to thequills.org.

Some of last year’s Quill winners were Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book of the Year) and The Historian author Elizabeth Kostova (Debut Author of the Year).
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Kiran Desai wins the 2006 Booker Prize for her novel Inheritance of Loss. Kiran Desai is the daughter of author Anita Desai, who has also received Booker Prize nominations in the past. This is Britain’s biggest literary award. Previous Booker Prize winners are the bestsellers Life of Pi (2002) and Vernon God Little (2003).

The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai

Description:
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country’s place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself. The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires-every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.

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Angelina Jolie will play Dagny Taggart in the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Jolie is known to have said that she was a fan of Rand’s work.

Atlas Shrugged is just one of Rand’s novels that include her philosophy of Objectivism. Objectivism is described by Rand as “…the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
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The Children of Hurin, J. R. R. Tolkien’s unfinished work begun in 1918 is now complete. Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, has finished the book after spending 30 years going through his father’s notes. The book is scheduled to be released in 2007.
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Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, the political activist’s critique of American foreign policy from the 1950s to 2003 gained media attention (and likewise bestseller status) when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez help up a copy during his famous UN General Assembly speech where he called American President George W. Bush, not fondly, “the devil.”
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Hannibal Rising, Thomas Harris’s fifth Hannibal Lecter book is coming this December. Harris has also written the screenplay for the movie which will be released in 2007. The previous four books in the series are: Black Sunday, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs and, Hannibal.
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Rowling: Two ‘Potter’ characters, maybe even Harry, will die in last Harry Potter book.
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Science Fiction publishing visionary, Jim Baen, dies at 63.
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Babar the Elephant, a timeless figure in children’s literature, turns 75.
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