John Updike, 1932-2009

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike has died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He was 76.

Updike was a prolific novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic. His books include A Month of Sundays, The Witches of Eastwick, Couples, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Too Far to Go, and the acclaimed Rabbit Novels — two of which, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Rabbit is Rich and The Centaur also won National Book Awards. He released more than fifty books in his fifty-year career.

After graduating from Harvard, Updike briefly studied painting at Oxford University before accepting a job at The New Yorker. A short story collection, a book of poems, and his first novel soon followed.

Updike is celebrated as a writer who had his fingers firmly on the pulse of suburban disillusionment. Indeed, he often minutely examined the ups and downs of suburban life, shedding light on the everyday events that shape us. He once wrote that his career goal had been to “give the mundane its beautiful due.”

He is survived by his wife Martha, four children, and three grandchildren.

 

Story Source  The New York Times, Wikipedia   |  Image Source  Issue Management

January 27, 2009 | Filed Under Authors, Newsies | Leave a Comment 

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Named

My goodness, all these awards are making me dizzy. On the heels of the Oscar nominations (Revolutionary Road, by the by, was robbed! Benjamin Button can kiss my furry snarkbutt), the National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCC) finalists have been announced.

The NBCC was founded in 1974 at the famed Algonquin and is comprised of 700 active book reviewers. Not surprisingly, I am not a member.

Past winners include Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Ian McEwan (Atonement), Philip Roth (The Counterlife and Patrimony: A Love Story), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), and Mark Doty (My Alexandria).

Here are this year’s nominees.

Fiction Finalists
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. (Farrar, Straus)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus)
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random)

Poetry Finalists
August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss)
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
Pierre Martory (translated by John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Finalists
Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

Biography Finalists
Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad)
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century (Penguin Press)
Patrick. French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

Autobiography Finalists
Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
Helene Cooper, The House On Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (WW Norton)
Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves Of Heaven (Harmony Books)
Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

Nonfiction Finalists
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)

Balakian Finalists (for excellence in reviewing)
Michael Antman
Ron Charles (winner)
Kathryn Harrison
Laila Lalami
Todd Shy

This year’s winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the Pen American Center.

 

Story Source  NBCC  |  Image Source  Discovery Education

January 26, 2009 | Filed Under Eyes on the Prize | Leave a Comment 

Today in the Trailer Park: Alaska, Alacrity, and Abs!

I have a wonderfully bizarro mix of literary trailers for you today.

In the first, Norman Wilkins tells the story of his move, in the 1970s, from Minnesota to the furthest reaches of Alaska. With his wife at his side, Wilkins etched out a life in the cold, hard frontier of the far north, recounted in 10,000 Days in Alaska.

Secondly, we have The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First by Dr. Mark Hyman (great name). In this book, Hyman details his revolutionary plan to reverse autism, ADD, depression, Alzheimer’s and more.

Finally, ABS! In The AbSmart Fitness Plan, chiropractor Adam Weiss tells us how to get the belly of our dreams. Sounds ABSolutely smashing (yuk-yuk-yuk).

January 23, 2009 | Filed Under Trailer Park | Leave a Comment 

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      WHAT IS A SNARK?




      The Snark is a creature created by Lewis Carroll in his poem "The Hunting of the Snark". To give a proper description of Snarks, one must look no further than Carroll himself, who summed them up in one word: Unimaginable.

      But this much we do know: some have feathers, some have whiskers. Snarks sleep a lot, yet they are an ambitious lot -- with very little sense of humor. They love bathing-machines and tend to bring them wherever they go; they are also handy for striking a light. Snarks live on a far-off island, a place filled with chasms and crags, and are constantly on the lookout for Snark-hunters. Their mortal enemies are hope, care, thimbles and forks.

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