Spring! (Go Red Sox!)
Spring is here! Welcome back color -- and welcome back 'Sox! They've started strongly, who knows, maybe they'll keep it up . . . maybe they'll bring home the first championship of the new millenium!
Pulitzer Prizes
Some Funnies
ABA Settles with the Chains: Point Made
Recommendations
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay |
Pulitzer Prizes 2001
We are more than happy (bubbly, ecstatic, giggly!) to note that Michael Chabon won the prize for fiction. We sold a fair number of this one (when we could keep it in stock!) and some of us gave it to a couple of people for birthdays, Christmas, &c. Now even more people will read it! It is an amazing book, settle in to be transported back to the USA in the 1930s. They don't write them like this any more, except Chabon has! So read it!
Fiction
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Nominated Finalists:
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
Drama
Proof by David Auburn
Nominated Finalists:
The Play About the Baby by Edward Albee
The Waverly Gallery by Kenneth Lonergan
Biography
W.E.B. Dubois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis
Lewis won a Pulitzer in 1994 for the first volume of the biography, W.E.B. Dubois Biography of a Race, 1868-1919.
Nominated Finalists:
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
General Nonfiction
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
Nominated Finalists:
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
History
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (a staff favorite) by Joseph J. Ellis
Nominated Finalists:
Way Out There in the Blue by Frances Fitzgerald
The Right to Vote by Alexander Keyssar
Poetry
Different Hours by Stephen Dunn
Nominated Finalists:
Pursuit of |
a Wound by Sydney Lea
The Other Lover by Bruce SmithABA and the Chains Settle ($4.7 million to the ABA and the original 26 bookshops)
After however-many years, when the American Booksellers Association and 26 independent bookshops' court case against the chain bookshops' unfair practices came to court, it wasn't long (six days!) before a settlement was announced.
The ABA sued using the Robinson-Patman Act, a little used law dating from one of those hopeful periods where laws were enacted to protect the little folks.
It seemed that the chain bookstores were using their sales weight to get larger discounts than were available to other vendors. Hopefully this will now end (laughs offstage at this point) and the 'playing field' will be more level.
The real fun here is probably in the court papers (it is unknown at this point whether these will be sealed or not) where many current and past executives of the chains had to testify about their business practices.
Score one for advocacy organizations. Onward! Your Uncle Willy shares some funnies:
So Descartes walks into a bar and the bartender asks, "What'ya thinking of
having?" He says, "Nothing," and vanishes.
Later than same night Heisenberg walks into the bar and the bartender says,
"What'll you have?" He says, "I'm not certain."
Just before closing time, a rather worse-for-wear Hamlet walks into the bar
and the bartender (wearily) asks, "What'll it be." "That's the question," says
Hamlet.
(This is what happens on a quiet Sunday evening.) Reccies from this month
Some poetry for this rather-late-in-National Poetry Month newsletter: Paul Muldoon, Hay, ranging from funny to difficult this challenging Irish author will bring back your faith in poetry. The couplet of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by the late Jane Kenyon, and Without by New England curmudgeon Donald Hall. A Massachusetts poet worth checking out, Robert Frazier. The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck. And, lastly, as always, Wislawa Szymborska, Wilfred Owen, and Pablo Neruda, all more than worth your time.
Terry Bisson (Bears Discover Fire) has a new novel, The Pickup Artist. Ursula Le Guin has a wonderful, fantastic, funny yet deeply moving collection of stories, Tales from Earthsea, that has just come out. These five stories (most of them pretty long) are all set in the same world as the her Earthsea quartet -- with a new novel due next year, also. Any adults or children looking for post-Potter or Pullman authors, definitely try these (supposing you might already have read Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, et al.
In a completely different vein, On Bullfighting by Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy is a personal exploration of the "sport" and how we stand in relation to it.
Watch out for news on Kelly Link's first collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, coming in July (you can pre-order here!), and for news about our favorite author John Usher who is hard at work on his latest opus. Historical fiction? Science fiction? Politics? Only time will tell.
Celebrate Earth Day -- plant a tree, a flower, something! |
