2011
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So You Want to Write a Children’s Book
“An Open Letter to Everyone Who Thinks it Must Be Easy, Writing Kid’s Books,” by Adam Rex. (via @lisabrowndraws)
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Calling All Steinbecks
“Three years into the Great Depression Steinbeck had already written Of Mice and Men, a tale of migrant farm workers, and had started on The Grapes of Wrath.” In these harsh economic times Michael Goldfarb asks, “Where are today’s Steinbecks?”…
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SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg
Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg are the authors of To Timbuktu, an illustrated travel memoir of their adventures together after college. Casey was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Steven grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. They met while studying abroad…
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Long Live the Essay
Lucasta Miller praises “the elastic glory of the essay” and the form’s (arguable) father, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
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Sultan of Swings Near San Francisco
In a certain context, a set of swings–and the mild risk, childish competition and sheer stomach-swirling delight that they offer–rise to the level of art. That context is a silent, cavernous gymnasium at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where…
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Black Lung Books
“Three advocacy groups have started a letter-writing campaign asking Scholastic Inc. to stop distributing the fourth-grade curriculum materials that the American Coal Foundation paid the company to develop.” It’s always good news when corporate sponsored “teaching materials” get called into…
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The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved: Rose
Inside a used bookstore at a grotesquely outsized strip mall in Fremont, California, I first pulled Li-Young Lee’s 1986 chapbook Rose from the shelf, a volume so thin the spine hardly held a label. Rose was pushed all the way…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Sometimes people care about things like literary hair. Vintage art machines are neat! What people draw when they draw about being happy. Patents, you know? Polish posters for American westerns (are pretty much my reason for living).
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A Chicago Street Encounter With a Man Nearly Executed
He drives a white Cadillac stretch limo, vintage 1970s, with whitewall tires, black vinyl roof, leather interior. Smooth ride. It’s the kind of car you might have seen ferrying newlyweds back in its day. But instead of “just married,” painted…
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Suing Google
“French publishers Albin Michel, Flammarion and Gallimard are suing Google for having scanned 9,797 books without prior permission…” Another lawsuit has been launched against the Google Book Search program. (via PW)