Books & Literature
Award winners ponder future of books
NEW YORK — The 60th annual National Book Awards was a night to celebrate literature and to wonder about its future. (Updated: 11/20/09 6:49 AM )
Ha Jin on reading, writing and ‘Waiting’
He started learning English when he was 20 years old; 23 years later, he would win the National Book Award for his remarkable novel, “Waiting.” (Updated: 11/19/09 9:02 AM )
Su Tong wins literary prize
HONG KONG — The story of a Chinese Communist Party official who moves to a community of boat people after his revolutionary lineage is refuted has won the Man Asian Literary Prize, organizers said. (Updated: 11/18/09 7:29 AM )
Alcott was ‘Jo,’ but there was nothing ‘little’ about her life
Louisa May Alcott inspired generations of girls with her own portrait in “Little Women” as rowdy, moody Jo March, who wished she had been born a boy, loved to run and skate, wrote plays with dashing parts for herself and “scribbled” stories to support herself and her family. (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Connelly gives new life to Detective Harry Bosch
It seems, at first, like your basic killing on the tough streets of South Los Angeles, the shooting death of a liquorstore owner in broad daylight. (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
‘Invisible’ never takes shape
Paul Auster has all the tools of a great novelist, and he puts them to work in his 15th novel, “Invisible.” The book is the story of a young poet, Adam Walker, who gets caught up in the perverse and violent world of a French professor, Rudolf Born, whom he meets at a party in 1967. By offering to finance a new literary magazine for Walker to edit, Born draws him into sexual intrigue and makes him witness to a murder, giving his life a permanent taint that is hard to shake off. (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Atwood goes back to the garden and the flood in a futuristic fable
Margaret Atwood — surely the cleverest of the clever — returns to the future in her disconcerting-yet-likable new novel, “The Year of the Flood.” (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Books in brief
CHILDREN’S (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Best Sellers
Compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide. (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Editor’s Choice
Last Words by George Carlin with Tony Hendra; Free Press, 294 pages ($26.99). You had to see one of those late-life George Carlin specials on HBO to fully understand why his fellow stand-up comedians worshipped him. Carlin was putting the pedal to the metal onstage just about to the end of his life, heart condition be damned. He died at 71 in June 2008, but he was still as brilliant—and sometimes as astonishing—as any comic out there, including those 40 and 50 years younger. (Updated: 11/15/09 8:08 AM )
Poetry: Up rooted by Sally Ann Miller
UP ROOTED
By Sally Ann Miller
(Updated: 11/12/09 1:30 PM )
By Sally Ann Miller
(Updated: 11/12/09 1:30 PM )
Back to the books: GI bill benefit means more veterans on campus
Buffalo State College freshmen Stephanie Hopkins and John “J. J.” Wright are 10 years apart in age and living very different lives. Wright, 31, is married with a young daughter and attending school full time, while Hopkins, 21, is just back in town and diving into her studies and her work. (Updated: 11/10/09 9:14 AM )
The posthumous publication of Nabokov’s highly original dream
It’s the literary story of 2009. But it begins almost 60 years ago with the most famous Conflagration That Never Was in American literature. (Updated: 11/10/09 9:16 AM )
Pergament: Syndicated reports tread new ground
One of the more popular periodic features in sports, entertainment or business answers the question “Where Are They Now?” (Updated: 11/10/09 7:58 AM )
‘Museum of Innocence’ an exploration of obsession
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk turns anthropologist of experience in his new work, “The Museum of Innocence.” He does this by encapsulating the world’s beauty, childhood and happiness with a master writer’s control of an obsessive personality. (Updated: 11/08/09 8:29 AM )