BNA_Editor | January 27, 2009
If you haven’t already heard, the world lost one of its true literary giants today when John Updike, the poet laureate of suburban American angst, died at the age of seventy-six from lung cancer. It’s hard to imagine a more profoundly prolific American author and, if you haven’t already encountered Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the [...]
BNA_Editor | January 27, 2009
While the Oscars have dominated the recent pop culture award talk, it should be noted that it’s also the award season for the vibrant field of children’s literature. Two of the biggest juvenile lit awards were announced this week, with author Neil Gaiman winning the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book and illustrator Beth Krommes [...]
D_DAmmassa | January 22, 2009
Modern fantasy has remained fairly monolithic for the past decade, consisting primarily of High Fantasy – castles, kings and queens, dragons, and sorcerers – usually arranged in trilogies, and almost always with a medieval style setting, though not in our historical past. There have always been exceptions, of course, perhaps, most notably, writers like Jim [...]
BNA_Editor | January 20, 2009
Ever wonder why the American South seems to have a culture all its own? Here are some of the essential books - both fiction and nonfiction - to read to begin understanding the region and its people, written from diverse perspectives.
1. Intruder in the Dust (1948), by William Faulkner, written at the height of the [...]
D_DAmmassa | January 20, 2009
During the 1980s, science fiction became more reflective of the present than the future and has subsequently become increasingly interested in short term extrapolations rather than the future a century or more from now. Although there have been notable exceptions, most writers – particularly newcomers to the field – have shown little interest in galactic [...]
J_Huang | January 19, 2009
Good news about reading!
Earlier this month, National Endowment of the Arts released study that shows that “for the first time since 1982 … the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen,” according to a report [...]
C_Reynolds | January 19, 2009
The relatively large number of new titles that lead off this volume’s list of books representing new westerns in 2008 is somewhat misleading. Although nearly sixty works are represented here, a good fourth of them are actually books with 2007 copyright dates, as they were issued too late in the calendar year to make the [...]
BNA_Editor | January 19, 2009
Even though we here at Books & Authors are devoted to recommending great works of literature to eager readers searching for a new book, that doesn’t mean that we don’t occasionally need your help. Sure, we have a crack team of experts and editors sifting through fiction and nonfiction titles to bring you the cream [...]
N_Danford | January 19, 2009
The coming-of-age story is one of the most common for a novel, especially a first novel. Almost all writers of fiction draw on their own autobiographies to some extent, and everyone who is an adult has experienced coming of age in at least some capacity. It’s what makes so many of these books–J.D. Salinger’s The [...]
D_Burt | January 19, 2009
In a quote that can serve as the modus operandi of the historical novelist, Oscar Wilde observed, “The one duty we have to history is to rewrite it.” Who has not fantasized about a “do over” in one’s life? What might have been and the road not taken continually beckon, and if the temptation to [...]
