Posted in A Monday Moment, Art & Photography, Literature, tagged Chicago on December 14, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Chicago from a Chopper, originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.
Chicago. At around draft 3, half of The Singing Fire took place there, during the world’s fair and then the Pullman strike. The research was fun and I visited Chicago, gawking at fin de siecle skyscrapers and Marshall Fields (department store), the tiffany ceiling in the [...]
Posted in A Monday Moment, Art & Photography, Literature, tagged Lu Chi, The Art of Writing, Wen Fu on November 30, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Fly, originally uploaded by David Guidi.
And from Lu Chi’s Wen Fu (The Art of Writing), 300 CE:
Writing is in itself a joy,
Yet saints and sages have long since held it in awe.
For it is being, created from a void;
It is sound rung out of profound silence.
In a sheet of paper is contained the infinite,
And, evolved [...]
Posted in Literature, My Life, tagged Angela Carter, I.L. Peretz, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Oliver, May Sarton, Stephen Levine on November 27, 2009 | 13 Comments »
What reason do you have to be grateful for books?
There are so many reasons, where do I begin? As a young kid, fairy tales were my first literary love, a metaphor for experiences I couldn’t name but could feel: the trial of good and evil, of helplessness, loneliness, abandonment, wandering in the dark, concealed identity, [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged Booker, Giller, Governor-General's award on November 26, 2009 | 10 Comments »
These are next on my list, a collection of prize winning novels delivered to me by Random House, which publishes my books in Canada. (In the U.S. it’s Scribner, Headline Review in UK, Bertelsmann in Germany, Mouria and Meulenhoff in Holland, Longanesi in Italy, Matar in Israel, Ulpius-haz in Hungary.)
Thank you Randy!
Posted in Literature, tagged Shakespeare by Bill Bryson on November 19, 2009 | 4 Comments »
A fashion of black teeth and ruffled collars, courtesy of the invention of starch imported from France, which led the upper classes to abhor the damp (wilted ruffles). This is the backdrop of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare. In a fun and fast book, he separates fact from myth about the playwright while providing a fascinating look [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged if Jane Austen lived today on November 18, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Dear Miss Austen,
Thank you for your submission, recommended to me by our mutual friend H____. Unfortunately it doesn’t meet our current needs. As you are doubtless aware, the market is tight and publishers are looking for books that feed the public appetite. During tough times like these, when our young men are going off to [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged Alan Bennett, mass market fiction, Uncommon Reader on November 17, 2009 | 8 Comments »
In The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Queen Eliabeth I chances on a mobile library and, to be polite, takes out a couple of books, thereby starting herself on a literary road that takes unexpected turns, some humorous, some serious. To make such a prominent person (who is still alive and, given the longevitiy of [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged Catherine Cookson, romance novels on November 6, 2009 | 10 Comments »
I read her autobiography first: Our Kate, originally published in the late 60’s and reprinted 25 years later. It was an interesting memoir of a woman born illegitimately in 1906 to a working class family in Northern England, whose early life was coloured by strikes, illness, alcoholism, and most of all the stigma of being [...]
Posted in Literature, My Life, tagged Books, h1n1 on October 30, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Children are doing well, bouncing off the walls because they feel healthy and have to stay home today. We’ll be having a couple more of same. We played 2 games of Clue, whereupon I bailed due to the extreme giddiness of said children and the poking of my bottom with a pen every time I [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged revision, writing process on October 22, 2009 | 12 Comments »
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: it won the Pulitzer prize for 2007, today number 544 on Amazon more than a year after being published in paperback. That is the kind of success that authors crave. And how did it come? Fast, easy, cranking out book after book, as authors also crave?
Five years after [...]
Posted in Literature, Politics & Economy, tagged Encyclopedia Britannica on October 19, 2009 | 7 Comments »
From the 1768 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Stock brokers: “Are those who are employed to buy and sell shares in the joint stock of a company or corporation … as the practice of stock-jobbing has been carried on to such an excess as became not only ruinous to a great number of private families, but [...]
