“Books chose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
- Salman Rushdie
First off, thanks for stumbling upon our blog. We’re starting off small, but you’ll be seeing a lot of great content appearing on these pages over the next few weeks and months. To get introductions out of the way, we’re the blog companion of Books & Authors, an amazing literary resource created by Cengage Gale, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing.
Books & Authors offers new ways to explore the endless possibilities and combinations of books, authors, genres, and topics. We draw upon the expertise of dozens of genre and subject experts to pick the very best award-winning and best seller fiction and nonfiction titles for your browsing pleasure. You can browse THOUSANDS of work overviews gathered by our experts; you can customize your own personal online reading room, gathering and organizing your favorite books and authors however you please; and write your own reviews of any book in our database.
But that’s not the end of the B&A experience. If your local library subscribes to Books & Authors Complete – (click here to see if a library in your area has access) – in addition to B&A’s normal features, you’ll also get access to tens of thousands of author biographies; a vast collection of books reviews from publications like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and more; our unparalleled collection of reading lists come from international library associations, literary publications, and from libraries all over the world; AND (if that wasn’t enough) our ” Who? What? Where? When?” search functionality that allows you to search for titles based on character, subject, location and time period.
And all you need to have all of that (and more) at your fingertips is web access and a library card. Not bad, eh?
So, if all that coolness exists over at Books & Authors, what’s the point of this blog?
It’s twofold. First, we’re trying to use this forum to give you a taste of the Books & Authors experience and possibly convince you to give our main site a spin. Second, we don’t want your usage of Books & Authors to be a one-way experience. We’re looking to build a community of engaged, opinionated, and voracious readers, and we’re hoping that, through our blog, we can introduce you to our team of experts and editors, start some discussions about what’s going on in the world of literature, and, ideally, get you so excited about the idea of reading that you’ll spend hours combing Books & Authors, desperately searching for the answer to that age-old question – “What do I read next?”
Take a look around the blog and our home site, excuse our growing pains, and get reading.
Enjoy!
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