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An Arizona school district has banned a long list of books, including Mexican-American history textbooks, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Ezra Pound's daughter is suing an Italian neo-fascist group who've named themselves CasaPound; GalleyCat reports on what editors are looking for in 2012; and other news.
“My favorite book of 2011 was ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot (Crown, 2010). I read the book in three days during a trip to Mexico over the summer, and I embodied the ‘could-not-put-it-down’ cliché. I brought the book with me to meals and read it while eating. I sat in a room by myself for hours with this book, ignoring the beach, the sun, and all human contact. Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cancerous cells were taken from her without her knowledge in the 1950s.
Did you read the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine? Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein star in Portlandia, currently in its second season on the Independent Film Channel.
Take a poem you feel is finished, and divide the poem in half. Write two new poems by filling in those two halves.
"I have been a huge fan of Chris Bachelder for years, ever since happening upon a copy of his wonderful road trip epic Bear v. Shark (Scribner, 2002). U.S.! is both a post modern look at disintegrating socialist dreams as well a truly enjoyable parody of political thrillers.The plot loosely follows various characters in their attempts to physically revive Upton Sinclair from the dead, who then work with the zombie Sinclair to advance Utopian ideals.
J.A. Konrath announced his e-books alone garnered $100,000 in three weeks; GalleyCat offers a reading list to supplement your viewing of Downton Abbey; the New York Times reviews An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the ____ You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side by musician and poet Ed Sanders; and other news.
“I found Carol Shields’s Unless (Fourth Estate, 2002) at our local Friends of the Library used-book sale fund-raiser. I recognized Shields as the author of a novel I had really enjoyed back in the early nineties—The Stone Diaries (Viking, 1993). I knew anything written by her would be a treasure and I was not disappointed. A rush of storytelling, like a wave crashing upon an empty beach at dawn, suddenly the reader is pulled under and moving with the tide.
Alberto Chimal of Mexico City reads his story "Variation on a Theme of Coleridge" from Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, published this month by Small Beer Press.
HarperCollins is launching a program today to sell thousands of backlist titles via print-on-demand technology at independent bookstores; Fast Company reports on the discovery of numerous plagiarized e-books in Amazon's Kindle Store; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton wrote a heartrending letter to her teenage daughter, Linda, intended to be reread in the future; and other news.
“After a year of reading books that ranged from the all-time classics to the recently acclaimed, I was surprised to realize that the best book I read in 2011 was Adam Langer's The Thieves of Manhattan (Spiegel & Grau, 2010), a book I was given as a gift and which I’d never heard of before. It was by no means the most intellectual or emotional book I read in the past year, but it was by far the most unique, engaging, and simply enjoyable novel I’ve read in a while.
