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Barnes & Noble Inc. announced the the winners of the 14th annual Discover Great New Writers Awards for fiction and nonfiction. The short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain (Ecco) won the fiction award. The nonfction award went to The Last Season by Eric Blehm(HarperCollins). Each writer was awarded a cash prize of $10,000, and a full year of additional marketing and advertising support.

Second place was awarded to Turkish writer O. Z. Livaneli's novel, Bliss (St. Martin's Press) for fiction and to Daniel Mendelsohn?s memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins), for nonfiction. Each second place winner received $5,000. Sam Savage's first novel, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife (Coffee House Press), and Marilyn Johnson's exploration of a literary art form, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (HarperCollins), won third place and a $2,500 prize for each.

The judges for the fiction awards were Mohsin Hamid, the author of the novel Moth Smoke, and an upcoming second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Lily King, the author of The English Teacher, whose first novel, The Pleasing Hour, won the Discover Award in 1999; and Marcus Stevens, the author of the novels The Curve of the World and Useful Girl.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Posted in Book Publishing News

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Simon P. Chappell writes "I missed the partying in the 70's and so was not exposed to the full groovy experience that was available. You could say that I was a late developer (pun intended). Thankfully, I am now able to make up for lost time by learning the Groovy scripting language. For those of you not familiar with Groovy, it is a dynamic language designed to run on a Java Virtual Machine and be easy for Java programmers to work with; it looks very similar to Java and will freely inter-operate with Java objects and libraries. I've been tinkering with Groovy on and off for about two years now; learning Groovy in the old days, prior to this year, was a challenge with all of the design changes that were taking place. Groovy in Action (GinA) is the book that I'd wished was available back then. Dierk König, a committer for the Groovy project, has written this definitive guide to Groovy and after what has seemed an eternity to those of us on the Groovy mailing list, it is finally available." Read below for the rest of Simon's review.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen discusses the film and how he tried to focus on the importance of public dissent.

"This is a movie about how popular mobilization changed centuries of tradition," says Morgan. "Millions of people took to the streets and made an old lady move. It's really an incredible thing."..... "In 1997, 2.2 million people went on the streets of London, sleeping rough, bringing the biggest city in Europe to a standstill so that a stubborn 70-year old lady would fly from Aberdeen to London," said Morgan to the crowd of glassy-eyed celebrities assembled for the ceremony. "What are we gonna have to do when it's really important ... You have to believe public protest counts for something."

*****

Morgan and Harries are clearly unfazed by the idea of being "political" and making films with a strong point of view -- a label most U.S.-based filmmakers working within the Hollywood system usually make an effort to avoid if at all possible. "Look at the world we're living in. You can certainly make movies that have nothing to do with anything going on in the world today, but those aren't the types of movies I'm interested in writing," says Morgan.

"I want to write about my world. I don't know the American experience all that well so I don't know how comfortable I'd feel writing something I know little about. By the same token, an American could have never written The Queen. The language is so different... it's not about class or elocution. It's about structure," says Morgan.

"Interestingly, The Queen is very much about saying goodbye to the old rules about class and language. I don't see a Britain where only those with Eton accents succeed ... that's no longer valid. We've become a different society, and The Queen isolates one moment of that transition."

Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen, but the film didn't get Best Picture or Best Screenplay. Helen Mirren noted that the film has hardly been noticed at all in England: it wasn't even nominated for a BAFTA. And, alas, it appears that those rumors that Dame Mirren was going to be invited to tea with the real Queen are not true at all.

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• All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones
• The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
• The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio
• Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

• Angels Fall by Nora Roberts
• Bee, Balms & Burgundy by Nelson Pahl (not available on Amazon?!? Here's his site.)
• Finding Noel by Richard Paul Evans
• Tear Down the Mountain by Roger Alan Skipper
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Lost Echoes (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Joe R. Lansdale, a review from Esquire by Snowden Wright.

by Hegi, Ursula
In Burgdorf, Germany, a small fictional town based on Hegi's hometown of Dusseldorf, we meet Trudi Montag, a "zwerg" or dwarf woman, who becomes town librarian, a storyteller and purveyor of local gossip. The novel spans the years from 1915 to 1951 and portrays a town reduced to silence, suspicion and fear as the dark curtain of Nazism appears, expands and envelops much of Europe. Trudi is a survivor. Her physical differences have always set her apart from everyone else - but the townspeople are so willing to bare their souls to her. The reader watches her mature, accept her "differences", find love and deal with loss. Stones From the River is the prequel to Hegi's Floating in My Mother's Palm. A moving and unforgettable story.
- reviewed by Susanne, South County Regional, PLCMC

Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, discusses her next book, Burning Bright, with The Independent. Known for including historical figures, such as Vermeer, in her novels, Chevalier's new book includes Romantic poet William Blake as a character. The research for the book was intense.

"I spent a whole year just researching," explains Chevalier, sitting in a London hotel bar eating a sandwich. "Everybody writes about Blake. It took me a long time to wade through enough to realize that none of this was helping me at all."

But getting the details right is fun. And Chevalier enjoys hands-on research. For Burning Bright, she bought a button-making kit and had a go at turning out the Dorset buttons her characters sell. Falling Angels saw her tramping about Highgate Cemetery as a volunteer guide, bumping into another novelist, Audrey Niffenegger, who also had the same idea.

*****

As a child, Chevalier loved books. "I was not particularly sporty or active. I was quite fat. I used to lie on my bed and read. Also my mother was sick when I was a kid. When I was three she got a heart condition. She died when I was eight." It was the 1960s. "There was no counselling or helping kids cope. None of that crap," she laughs. "Reading was a kind of refuge".

Losing her mother young must have affected Chevalier, but she remembers only a little about her. "If you want a psychoanalytical answer as to why I write, it would probably be that I do it to make sense of loss. There's a lot of loss in my books and a lot of death. Most of my protagonists are quite young. Maybe that's my working through being forced to grow up so suddenly."

Chevalier says that she seems to be writing about all of her teenage obsessions, which included Vermeer and Blake. She says that Burning Bright examines the loss of innocence and how that experience is different from gaining experience. We can certainly see why she would have chosen William Blake as her current muse, then. His Songs of Innocence and Experience would no doubt make a delightful reading companion to Burning Bright, which is available now for preorder at Amazon.com.

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The latest news, reviews, and appearances, back from a week (and a day) off. (By the way, if you're as obsessed/contemptuous of the inner workings of that old dinosaur, The New York Times Book Review, as much of the irrepressibly new blogosphere seems to be, take a look at Gawker's lengthy note-taking from a recent appearance of Review editor Barry Gewen at Harvard U.)

The New York Times:

• Sunday's Book Review cover: Remainder by Tom McCarthy: "What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them.... You find yourself exhilarated by your confusion, wanting to be caught--if only to learn, as the fangs sink in, what the chase was actually for."
• Last Sunday's cover: Dancing to "Almendra" by Mayra Montero (three cheers for the Times, by the way, for putting relatively unknown novels on its cover two straight weeks): "Her writing is swift and agile; it dances like a tough kid in a good suit--well pressed but never boring, and never calling attention to the strength that lies behind it."
• Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman: "What André Aciman considers, elegantly and with no small amount of unbridled skin-to-skin contact, is that maybe the heat of eros isn't only in the friction of memory and anticipation. Maybe it's also in the getting."
• Leap!: What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives? by Sara Davidson: "When Ms. Davidson wrote "Loose Change" in 1977, she took on the voice-of-a-generation mantle. Years passed. Her generation didn't do anything interesting. But now it's in a pickle, and it needs a voice again."

The Daily Show:

• Tue., Feb. 27: Man in the Middle by John Amaechi
• Thu., Mar. 1: A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting by Sam Sheridan

Oprah®:

• Tue., Feb. 27: In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Lee and Bob Woodruff

Fresh Air:

• Fri., Feb. 23: The Dogs Who Found Me by Ken Foster
• Thu., Feb. 22: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, Jeb: America's Next Bush by S.V. Date, and When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda
• Wed., Feb. 21: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
• Tue., Feb. 20: Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life by Allen Shawn

All Things Considered:

• Fri., Feb. 23: The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being by Sherwin Nuland and Fledgling by Octavia Butler
• Wed., Feb. 21: Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences--Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him by Carl Crow

The New Yorker:

• Mar. 5 issue: No book reviews (outside Briefly Noted), but there's a story by Steven Millhauser (a personal favorite), that begins, "You are angry, Elena. You are furious."

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore

In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country's first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti's small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa. This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.

At one moment in Thomas Pynchon's novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history's verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its 'assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good'. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: 'You wonder? That's all? What about 'care'? Don't you care?' The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do. They have clients, they meet their clients' requests. Just doing their job. There aren't too many significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers - Powers's imagination is deeply invested in the local and in Pynchon the local is always about to become something else - but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo Maker. A woman reads a series of books about strange mental conditions by a fictional writer not entirely without resemblance to Oliver Sacks. She greatly admires the books but is even more amazed by the selfless devotion of the friend who drew her attention to them. 'She was in Daniel's debt again . . . And she, once again, had given him nothing . . . Of all the alien, damaged brain states this writing doctor described, none was as strange as care.'

It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discover the geometrical theorem that bears his name? No. Did he ponder the harmony of the spheres? Certainly not: celestial spheres were first excogitated decades or more after Pythagoras' death. Does he even deserve credit for his most famous accomplishment, analysing the mathematical ratios that structure musical concordances? Possibly, but there is little reason to believe the stories about his being the first to discover them, and compelling reason not to believe the oft-told story about how he did it. Allegedly, as he was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, recently rehashed in the article on Pythagoras in Grove Music Online, the sounds made by a blow do not vary proportionately with the weight of the instrument used.

That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present by Robert Tombs, a review from The Atlantic Monthly by Benjamin Schwarz.

by Klosterman, Chuck
Klosterman's latest work comes in 3 parts: articles he has written for SPIN magazine, mostly interviews with the famous and the nearly-famous; short essays offering his opinions on various topics and introduced by ethical-philosophical conundrums in the form of the kind of questions you might ask your closest friend if you were both very, very drunk; and an unfinished autobiographical novella. The overlong first section makes the book feel like a significant departure from his earlier, extremely confessional works, but the middle and most especially the last parts reassure you that this is indeed the same guy who wrote Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I was not at all expecting to enjoy the novella section, but found myself very quickly wanting to know what happened next and wishing there was more when it ended.
- reviewed by Robert, Matthews Branch, PLCMC

by Connelly, Michael
Connelly's latest Harry Bosch novel is his strongest work since Blood Work. Harry, back with the LAPD and working in a special unit that handles open, unsolved cases, is handed a gift by an ambitious district attorney: a recently-captured serial killer wants to confess to a murder that Harry has been trying to pin on another suspect for more than 10 years. Harry looks this gift horse squarly in the mouth, unwilling to believe that all his instincts about his original suspect could be so wrong. But when the serial killer leads him to the victim's body, he begins to doubt himself. And the ride is just beginning.
- reviewed by Robert, Matthews Branch, PLCMC

by Tademy, Lalita
"Come closer. This is not a story to go down easy." So begins Lalita Tademy's work Red River in which she chronicles the lives of her paternal ancestors after the finality of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction. By telling of the events of April 13, 1873, Tademy weaves an intricate tale of the lives of colored men, women and children after the Civil War and the battles that continued to rage for equality, including the massacre within the town of Colfax, Louisiana. Much like Cane River, this is once again a remarkable story of survival, integrity and love told by a woman descended from ordinary men and women. A woman who while discovering her family, created a new world for readers.
- reviewed by Courtney, Independence Regional, PLCMC

by Nelson, James L.
Had Benedict Arnold died of his wound at Saratoga, he would have been remembered as a hero not a villain in the American Revolution. This is the story of the Northern Campaigns of 1775-1777 from the taking of Fort Ticonderoga by a force led by Ethan Allen and Arnold (Allen usually gets the credit) to the American victory at Saratoga. In between we have the American invasion of Canada, failing in the snow before the walls of Quebec and the British counterthrust down the Lake Champlain waterway. The title of the book refers to the "fleet" action on the lake in which the American navy led by Arnold stopped the British advance for the year while destroying itself in the process.
- reviewed by John, Main Library, PLCMC

honestpuck writes "When reading the foreword of Rails Cookbook I felt a strong kinship with Zed Shaw, I too have fond memories of the first edition of Perl Cookbook and the way I relied on it once I'd taken the training wheels off. Since that one I have relied on several of the O'Reilly Cookbook series. It is only when I discard the early tutorial and dive in the deep end with a "cookbook" on my desk that I really start to learn proficiency." Read the rest of honestpuck's review.

In Jane Smiley’s Hollywood novel, a group of friends make love and discuss war.

Tom Bissell accompanies his father, a Marine veteran, back to Vietnam.

Mitch Albom has inked a deal with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions to turn his bestselling novel For One More Day into a tv movie.

Mitch Albom says he'll work with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films Inc. for a TV movie based on his bestseller "For One More Day." Albom told the Detroit Free Press for a story Tuesday that Winfrey saw the book in manuscript form and expressed early interest. He wrote the teleplay and will serve as an executive producer. Lloyd Kramer will direct.

"For One More Day" tells the story of a former baseball player who plans to end his life but finds redemption when he gets the chance to spend another day with his dead mother. Casting is underway, and filming is expected to begin in July. The two-hour movie is tentatively scheduled to air in December on ABC-TV. The movie will carry the "Oprah Winfrey Presents" title, as did the 1999 TV film adaptation of Albom's "Tuesdays With Morrie."

Posted in General Fiction

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Michael Arndt won Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine and William Monahan picked up the Oscar for Best Adapated Screenplay for The Departed. Michael Arndt said in his acceptance speech that "A writer is only as good as people he works with," thanking the cast who "collectively saved my life."

The normally publicity-shy Monahan opened his acceptance speech by noting that "Valium does work." He then went on to say that seeing the film Lawrence of Arabia when he was a boy made him want to be a screenwriter, and to be at the same Oscars as Peter O'Toole was "just crazy." The Departed was adapted from the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.

Beginning one's Oscar acceptance speech with a heartfelt Ode to Valium was not the choice we would have made, but hey, we're not judging. Maybe he can turn it into a paid endorsement deal from pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche.

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This Human Season by Louise Dean, a review from Christian Science Monitor by Yvonne Zipp.