Month: April 2013

Original Breakfast at Tiffany’s Script Sells for Big Bucks

April 30, 2013 admin 0

We just can’t seem to get away from hot written ephemera auction news lately. Every time we turn around, we’re reporting that some new poem or book or manuscript has left the block in a shower of unprecedented dollars. Our most recent entry comes from Amherst, Massachusetts where Truman Capote’s typed and corrected script for the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s recently sold in an online auction for $306,000. According to Associated Press, “Capote’s handwritten notations […]

This Just In… The Seeker by Malcolm R. Campbell

April 30, 2013 admin 0

David Ward grows up on a Montana ranch where he develops an enduring love of mountains and the magic of the high country secrets he learns from his medicine woman grandmother. A vision quest at the summit of a sacred mountain opens his eyes to his future while blinding him to the details. As a seasonal employee at a mountain hotel, David meets Anne Hill during the summer of Glacier National Park’s worst flood. Out […]

Sotheby’s and PEN Team Up to Present Innovative Literary Auction

April 29, 2013 admin 0

Auction house Sotheby’s and the English branch of PEN, the international writer’s organization, have teamed up to produce an innovative fundraiser for the organization. Fifty member authors have contributed first-edition copies of one of their books, annotated, commented on or illustrated in a creative way. Some of the authors whose work is included are Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Margaret Drabble, Helen Fielding, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, J.K. Rowling, Lionel Shriver and […]

This Just In… Remember to Breathe by Simon Pont

April 29, 2013 admin 0

“Last night I was breaking all the rules, making up new ones. Me, a wild bunch of one, trailing a blaze of glory, saying, yes, tonight, I’m living on a prayer. I was winging it, squaring off with fate, dialing my date with destiny, letting my ego write the checks, going eye-to-eye, punch-for-punch, drink-for-drink with the ruffian that is life. “And when I was done, there was no need to look back in anger, because […]

Crime Fiction: Too Many Cooks and Champagne for One by Rex Stout

April 29, 2013 admin 2

In 2008 and 2009, Bantam Books reprinted 10 of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin mysteries in rather handsome two-in-one paperback volumes. One of those — comprising both Too Many Cooks and Champagne for One — had been sitting on my shelf, unread, for a couple of years. But I finally took it with me on a recent trip. Like most mystery-fiction fans, I’d read plenty of Nero Wolfe stories in years past, and was ready […]

This Just In… A Good Catch by L.L. Lee

April 29, 2013 admin 0

The seven women in the Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, grief support group have been meeting for four years in an effort to comfort each other. Now, tired of grieving and feeling sorry for themselves, some are ready to get on with their lives and look for new love. Everyone joins the fishing party; ven the woman in the throes of menopause who vows at first to stay single, and the 90ish member who has lost […]

New in Paperback: Raising Elijah by Sandra Steingraber

April 28, 2013 admin 0

Several years ago, my husband and I decided not to have children. It’s a decision we’ve seldom regretted, but I never regretted it less than when reading Sandra Steingraber’s Raising Elijah (Da Capo), a book that is essentially about the hazards of raising children in an increasingly toxic world. Dangers to children — both born and unborn — abound. The very thought of it must, for parents, be crazy making. I can’t imagine how they […]

This Just In… I’ll See You in Your Dreams by Tony Miller

April 28, 2013 admin 0

Charlie was a ghost hunter who didn’t really believe in ghosts, but he believed in the effect being a ghost hunter had on girls. He thought he had perfected the ultimate pick up line, “I’m a ghost hunter.” All that came crashing down when he met his soulmate… a ghost. While photographing a Victorian mansion he was startled to meet the ghost of Anne Meux. She died in 1970 at age 85. In ghost form, […]

Dawkins Tops Lists of World Thinkers

April 26, 2013 admin 0

Like the lists of the most beautiful and most successful people in the world, a list of the world’s best thinkers has to be at least a teensy bit subjective. Even so, when Prospect Magazine named author, intellectual and all ’round brainy guy, Richard Dawkins, the world’s top thinker a few days ago, there wasn’t a lot of disagreement. Says Prospect: When Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, coined the term “meme” in The Selfish […]

New Today: The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran

April 24, 2013 admin 0

Imagine the creation of an author who lives in Bangalore, studied at Bryn Mawr and has lived in NYC. Imagine the best of all of that: wordly observations, cunningly made with sophisticated style and an observance of an inward eye and you have an idea of what the work of Lavanya Sankaran looks like. The Hope Factory (Dial) is the second book of the author of 2006’s The Red Carpet, a collection of fresh and fascinating […]