August 2008
36 posts
salman rushdie on perez hilton?! →
Hey mommas and daddys!
Gossiping in front of your kids may lead them down a path that ends at the prestigious Booker Prize.
Best of the Booker winner Salman Rushdie revealed that his mother was a “world class gossip” and that it was from her that he got a feel for talking about secrets.
He said things got to the point where she threatened to stop passing him rumors because they kept...
“the worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for...”
– salman rushdie, the satanic verses
junot diaz reading in nyc →
We waited eleven years for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the long-promised novel from Dominican-born New Yorker Junot Diaz. His debut, the short-story collection Drown, was as popular in Brooklyn Heights as Washington Heights, and the novel proved well worth the wait: An epic, semi-magical history of one pitiable overweight nerd and his Dominican-American family, it’s even truer to Diaz’s...
'100 Things' author dies at 47 →
Dave Freeman, co-author of “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” a travel guide and ode to odd adventures that inspired readers and imitators, died after hitting his head in a fall at his home. He was 47.
Freeman died August 17 after the fall at his Venice home, his father, Roy Freeman, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
An advertising agency executive, Freeman co-wrote the 1999 book...
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still...”
– jerry seinfeld
“Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, too...”
– salman rushdie, the satanic verses
how fiction works →
His essential point is this: Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world. The mind and the world, as Wood defines them, are dependable, fixed phenomena, for the most part,...
“in this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological...”
– salman rushdie, the satanic verses.
Harry Potter Movie Release Delayed :( →
Muggles, get ready for some bad news: There will be no Harry Potter movie this year.
In a surprise move, Warner Bros. has moved back the release date of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from Nov. 11 to July 17, 2009.
Appeals court reverses Steinbeck copyrights ruling →
“A federal appeals court Wednesday reversed a ruling that awarded one of John Steinbeck’s sons and a granddaughter publishing rights to 10 of the author’s early works, including “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men.”
The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will leave the rights in the hands of Penguin Group Inc. and the heirs of John...
“So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled...”
– salman rushdie, the satanic verses
marathon man →
“For Murakami, long-haul running is not just a metaphor for the loneliness of the long-distance novelist; it’s pretty well synonymous with it. In the style of Albert Camus — who claimed that much of what he knew about morality and duty he learned from soccer — Murakami believes that “most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” Specifically, he believes that...
“When I got my library card, that was when my life began.”
– rita mae brown
“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke,...”
– charles dickens
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between...”
– george orwell
george orwell diaries to be published as a blog →
“The first entry will be posted on August 9, exactly 70 years to the day since the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote it.
Running until 1942 the diaries cover the start of the Second World War as well as Orwell’s own travels to Morocco following the illness and injuries he sustained while fighting in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.”
the younger side of nick hornby →
Jessica Murphy: Your novels certainly do have an element of redemption.
Nick Hornby: For me, it’s really important. I think there are plenty of people writing books where there is no redemption at all. That seems to be another job that contemporary fiction has taken upon itself—to deny people all hope. I find that tough, actually. People work hard, and their lives are difficult enough as it is...
“Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should...”
– charles caleb colton
rushdie's readers love to hate him →
“So like punk rock — that other loud art form — Rushdie’s idiosyncratic and individual style of writing has become a genre, an industry that has lost favour to a quieter, subtler style of writing. And it’s this dilemma of how to read a great writer of our times with an out-of-fashion style — and there are plenty of bad writers of ‘loud’ writing out there — that scares many of us off from...
“Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether comtemplating it when...”
– yann martel, life of pi
“Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any...”
– yann martel, life of pi
“I was weeping because Richard Parker left me so unceremoniously. What a terrible...”
– yann martel, life of pi