“Put Something In,” a short poem by popular poet and children’s book writer Shel Silverstein, is interpreted with a dark twist in this video.
In this video, bestselling fantasy author Terry Brooks describes his new book, Armageddon’s Children.
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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:
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.
Children and adults who like to read Harry Potter, Eragon, Cornelia Funke books…will enjoy this book.
The Water Mirror
by Kai Meyer
Kai Meyer is the author of many highly acclaimed and popular books for adults and young adults in his native Germany. The Water Mirror, which was nominated for the German Book Prize and was on many bestseller lists in Germany, has been translated into fourteen languages. Kai Meyer lives in Germany.
Description:
In Venice, magic is not unusual. Merle is apprenticed to a magic mirror maker, and Serafin — a boy who was once a master thief — works for a weaver of magic cloth. Merle and Serafin are used to the mermaids who live in the canals of the city and to the guards who patrol the streets on living stone lions. Merle herself possesses something magical: a mirror whose surface is water. She can reach her whole arm into it and never get wet.
But Venice is under siege by the Egyptian Empire; its terrifying mummy warriors are waiting to strike. All that protects the Venetians is the Flowing Queen. Nobody knows who or what she is — only that her power flows through the canals and keeps the Egyptians at bay.
When Merle and Serafin overhear a plot to capture the Flowing Queen, they are catapulted into desperate danger. They must do everything they can to rescue the Queen and save the city — even if it means getting help from the Ancient Traitor himself.
Ages: 12 and up
Grades: 7 and up
Awards:
New York Public Library “Books for the Teen Age”
School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Read a secret here…
PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
by Frank Warren
Description:
For the Postsecret project, which was started in October 2004, Warren asked people to write a secret they had never told anyone on a handmade postcard and mail it to him. This compilation is astonishing in its honesty and creativity.
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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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A Natural History of the Senses
by Diane Ackerman
Review:
Diane Ackerman’s lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth.
“Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.”–The New York Times
Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami
Description:
Battle Royale, a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, is one of Japan’s best-selling - and most controversial - novels. As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one “winner” remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television. A Japanese pulp classic available in English for the first time, Battle Royale is a potent allegory of what it means to be young and survive in today’s dog-eat-dog world. The first novel by small-town journalist Koushun Takami, it went on to become an even more notorious film by 70-year-old gangster director Kinji Fukusaku.
Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval talk about their book, The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness to be released in September.
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Heidi Julavits on her novel, The Uses of Enchantment, to be released in October.
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Alex Kuczynski on her book, Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery, to be released in October. Topics discussed in this video may be graphic for some.
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Charlotte’s Web
by E. B. White
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One of the classics of children’s literature, this widely read tale takes place on a farm in Maine and concerns a pig named Wilbur and his devoted friend Charlotte, the spider who manages to save his life by writing words in her web. The movie stars Julia Roberts, Dakota Fanning, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Buscemi, among others.
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
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The true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. It is a funny, harrowing and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.
The Prestige
by Christopher Priest
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Winner of the World Fantasy Award
In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent seance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose one another. Directed by Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, Memento), the movie stars Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, and Michael Caine.
