April 14th, 2010 § § permalink
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist, based in New York City. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known for his books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009).
Gladwell’s British father, Graham M. Gladwell, was a civil engineering professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada; his mother, Joyce E. (née Nation), is a Jamaican-born psychotherapist.
According to research done by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America, Gladwell’s family tree includes ancestors of West Indian, English, Jewish, Irish and Scottish heritage. One of his European ancestors arrived in Jamaica in the mid-17th century and seeded a long line of privileged mixed-race Jamaicans, the Fords. On his father’s side, his great-great grandparents, Thomas Adams and Jane Wilson, left England and Ireland to take part in the Castlemaine gold rush in Victoria, Australia in the 1850s.
Gladwell has said that his mother, who published a book titled Brown Face, Big Master in 1969, is his role model as a writer. Though born in the United Kingdom, Gladwell was raised in Elmira, Ontario, Canada. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto’s Trinity College in 1984. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1500 meter Midget Boys title at the 1978 Ontario High School championships in Kingston, Ontario, in a duel with eventual Canadian Open record holder David Reid. In the summer of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.
Gladwell began his career at The American Spectator, a conservative monthly. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, before joining The Washington Post as a business writer in 1987. He later served as a science writer and as New York bureau chief for the Post before leaving the paper in 1996. He is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker. His books—The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005)—were international bestsellers. Both works were substantially serialized in The New Yorker. Gladwell received a US$1 million advance for The Tipping Point, which went on to sell over two million copies in the United States. Blink sold equally well. His third book, Outliers: The Story of Success, was released November 18, 2008. His latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, was published on October 20, 2009. What the Dog Saw bundles together his favourite articles from the New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996.
Gladwell’s first work, The Tipping Point, discusses the potentially massive implications of small-scale social events, while his second book, Blink, explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences allow people to make informed decisions very rapidly. Outliers examines how a person’s environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success. Gladwell stated,
The hope with The Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.
In 2005, Time named Malcolm Gladwell one of its 100 most influential people. In 2007, he received the American Sociological Association’s first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues. Also in 2007, the University of Waterloo awarded him an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters.
Gladwell’s books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. He has, however, received criticism from academics for his sampling methods (resulting in hasty generalizations and selection biases), as well as his tendency to imply causation between events where only correlation exists.
Several prominent writers and social scientists have challenged the integrity of Gladwell’s approach, with Steven Pinker, in particular, accusing Gladwell of, “cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies.” Gladwell has been criticized as oversimplifying the essence of large complex phenomena, focusing on out of context data, and making pseudoscientific claims that are inadequately researched.
Popular Books by Malcolm Gladwell
Popular Books by Malcolm Gladwell
April 13th, 2010 § § permalink
Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic and Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. He is currently a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the private, nondenominational, co-educational college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Later, he attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club. He also received a masters degree in economics from the London School of Economics in 1985.
Lewis went on to work with New York art dealer Wildenstein, and then became a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in London, an experience he described in his first book, Liar’s Poker (1989). While at Salomon Brothers, he continued to work nights and weekends as a journalist, an effort he continues to this day with pieces for periodicals like The New York Times Magazine.
In the The New New Thing (1999) he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley technological scene, and discussed obsession with innovation. He considered this phenomenon both from the perspective of the computer engineers actually making the new products, and the entrepreneurs who invested in them.
Four years later, Lewis again entered the cultural mainstream with Moneyball, in which he investigated the dramatic success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, a baseball team which won consistently despite not being particularly well-funded by Major League Baseball standards. He noted the influence of baseball thinkers such as Bill James on the Oakland front office, which used their arguments to find underrated baseball players. In contrast to other teams which still considered potential players almost entirely on their physical abilities, such as speed and strength, Beane considered prior performance at the college and minor league level. This allowed him to find players whose physical skills might have been ordinary, but were still able to play extraordinarily well on the field. James also argued that certain skills, such as the ability to get on base, were equally valuable as the ability to hit, though most baseball decision makers considered the latter to be of more importance. Beane was thus able to find players who were able to provide high value for bargain prices. Lewis determined that these strategies, among others, allowed the relatively cash-poor A’s to often outperform much wealthier teams.
In August 2007 he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, entitled “In Nature’s Casino.”
Lewis has worked for the New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the Dad Again column for Slate. Lewis was one of the high-profile hires to Conde Nast Portfolio but in February of 2009 he left Portfolio to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.
Lewis married Diane de Cordova Lewis, his girlfriend prior to his Salomon days. After several years, he was briefly married to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner, before marrying the former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren on October 4, 1997. Lewis lives with Tabitha, 2 daughters, and one son (Quinn, Dixie, and Walker) in Berkeley, California.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
The Big Short tells a story of spectacular, epic folly.
It has taken the world’s greatest financial meltdown to bring Michael Lewis back to the subject that made him famous. His international bestseller Liar’s Poker exposed the greed and carnage of the City and Wall Street in the 1980s; he wrote it as a cautionary tale, but people seem to have read it as a how-to guide. Now, he wants to settle accounts.
In this visceral tour to the heart of the financial system, Michael Lewis takes us around the globe and back decades to trace the origins of the current crisis. He meets the people who saw it coming, the people who were asleep at the wheel and the people who were actively driving us all of a cliff. How could we have all been so deluded for quite so long? Where did it all start? Was it systemic? Was it avoidable? And who the hell can we blame? Michael Lewis has the answers.
No one is better qualified to get to the heart of this labyrinthine story. And no one can make it such an enjoyable ride along the way.
Popular Books by Michael Lewis
Popular Books by Michael Lewis
February 22nd, 2010 § § permalink
Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading “Capital” (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière’s book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.
Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.
One of the few philosophers to write so influentially on a egalitarianism education and pedagogy besides Paulo Freire (see Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Ranciere’s book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, published in 1991, has earned its reputation as a must-read for educators and educators-to-be. In the text, through the story of Joseph Jacotot, Ranciere challenges his readers to consider equality as a starting point rather than a destination. In doing so, readers are asked to abandon all of the cultural deficiency and salvation themes so pervasive in educational rhetoric today. Rather than requiring informed schoolmasters to guide students towards prescribed and alienating ends, Ranciere argues that educators can channel the equal intelligence in all to facilitate their intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The schoolmaster need not know anything (i.e., s/he may be ignorant). No longer should the oppressed feel bound to experts or reliant on others for their intellectual emancipation. Because all are of equal intelligence, and everything can be found in everything, the poor and disenfranchised should feel perfectly able to teach themselves whatever it is they want to know. Anyone can lead. One need not let one’s ignorance stand in the way of embarking on the journey towards personal and/or collective intellectual emancipation.
In 2003 Rancière co-signed, with other French intellectuals, a letter, addressed to Putin, protesting the illegitimacy of the 2003 Chechen referendum.
In 2006, it was reported that Rancière’s aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Frieze Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.
Aesthetics and Its Discontents
Aesthetics and Its Discontents by Jacques Rancière
Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation.
Aesthetics and Its Discontents is translated by Steven Corcoran. Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.
February 14th, 2010 § § permalink
Fire and Ice
Fire and Ice by Julie Garwood
In the book Fire and Ice, Sophie Rose is a crime reporter at a major Chicago newspaper and the daughter of Bobby Rose, a charming gentleman and big-time thief. When asked to write an exposé about her notorious father, Sophie quits and goes to work at a small newspaper, covering local personalities such as William Harrington, the 5K runner whose trademark is red socks. Those socks—with Sophie’s business card tucked inside—are practically all that’s found after Harrington is killed near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, seemingly in a brutal polar bear attack.
Sophie heads north to investigate, but danger follows in her wake. After one attempt on her life, she’s assigned brash but sexy Jack MacAlister as a bodyguard. But Sophie and Jack will soon be fighting more than their growing passion for each other. Powerful forces will stop at nothing to prevent the exposure of the sinister conspiracy Sophie and Jack are about to uncover.
About the Author
Julie Garwood
Julie Garwood was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the sixth of seven children in a large Irish family. She has six sisters: Sharon, Mary Kathleen, Marilyn, Mary, Mary Colette “Cookie”, Joanne and Monica, and one brother: Tom. After having a tonsillectomy at age six, Garwood was a sickly child for years. Because she missed so much school, she did not learn to read as the other children her age did. She was eleven before her mother realized that other children had been doing her homework, and that Garwood was simply unable to read. A math teacher, Sister Elizabeth, devoted the entire summer that year to teaching Garwood how to read, and how to enjoy the stories she was reading. This teacher had such an impact on Garwood’s life that she named her daughter Elizabeth.
While studying to be an R.N., Garwood took a Russian history course and became intrigued by history, choosing to pursue a double major in history and nursing. A professor, impressed by the quality of her essays, convinced Garwood to take a year off of school to write. The result was a children’s book, What’s a Girl to Do?, and her first historical novel, Gentle Warrior.
She married young with Gerry Garwood, they have three children: Gerry Jr., Bryan Michael and Elizabeth, the family resides in Leawood, Kansas. Although Garwood enjoyed her writing, she was not intending to pursue a career as an author. As a young wife and mother she took several freelance writing jobs, and wrote longer stories to amuse herself. After her youngest child started school, Garwood began attending local writers’ conferences, where she soon met an agent. The agent sold both her children’s book and her historical novel, and soon the publisher requested more historical romances.
Garwood’s novels are particularly known for the quirkiness of her heroines, who tend to have an ability to get lost anywhere, clumsiness, and a “charming ability to obfuscate and change the direction of conversations to the consternation, frustration, but eventual acceptance of the other party.” She is not afraid to tackle difficult issues, and one of her books deals with spousal abuse. Her novels are very historically accurate, and Garwood has been known to scour the library at the University of Kansas to find three sources confirming a fact before she includes it in one of her books.
In fifteen years of writing, by 2000 Garwood had penned 15 New York Times Bestsellers with over 30 million copies of her books in print. Despite her success in the historical romance genre, Garwood ventured into a new genre and began writing contemporary romantic suspense novels. Like her historicals, these contemporaries still focus on family relationships, whether between blood relatives or groups of friends who have styled themselves as a family.
Her first contemporary offering, Heartbreaker, has been optioned for film and was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine.
Garwood admits that she does not read romance novels, primarily so that she does not have to worry about unintentional plagiarism. Instead, she enjoys reading general fiction and mystery novels, but looks forward to the day she retires so that she can catch up on the romance novels written by other authors.
Other Popular Books by Julie Garwood
Popular Books by Julie Garwood
February 2nd, 2010 § § permalink
About O Thiam Chin
O Thiam Chin
O Thiam Chin’s short stories have appeared in several literary anthologies and journals, including Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Best of Singapore Erotica and Silverfish New Writing 6. His debut collection of stories, Free-Falling Man, was published in 2006. In 2009, MPH Publishing will publish his latest story collection, Never Been Better. A graduate with a degree in English Language and Literature from the Singapore Institute of Management, Thiam Chin has won several awards for his screenplay and short stories.
Never Been Better (Featured Book)
Never Been Better by O Thiam Chin
In this new collection of stories, O Thiam Chin has created a series of unforgettable, deeply-affecting portraits of individuals whose intersections of loves and losses mark the dawn of awareness and longing in their lives.
Never Been Better illustrates his literary versatility in his assortment of characters who occupy a world of ambivalence and false optimism, yet still persist in trudging on with strength and resilience.
From free-spirited teenage runaways and a lonely child who collects dead animals to hidden family secrets and migrant workers who live squalid lives far away from home, these eclectic stories are heartbreaking, haunting and rendered with a touch of grace, compassion and poignancy.
News About O Thiam Chin
February 1st, 2010 § § permalink
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980.
Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny: Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish “Hapworth 16, 1924″ in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was indefinitely delayed. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009, after filing a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer’s use of one of Salinger’s characters from The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.
References
Popular Books by J.D. Salinger
Popular books by J. D. Salinger
January 30th, 2010 § § permalink
Robert B Parker
Robert Brown Parker (September 17, 1932 – January 18, 2010) was an American crime writer. His most famous works were the Spenser novels, which were the starting point for a television series, Spenser: For Hire, on the ABC network during the late 1980s. His works incorporate considerable knowledge about the Boston metropolitan area. Parker died at his desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 18, 2010.
Biography
Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Parker married Joan H. Parker on August 26, 1956, whom he claims to have met as a toddler at a birthday party. (They spent their childhoods in the same neighborhood.)
Parker and his wife had two sons, David and Daniel. Originally, Parker’s character Spenser was to have the first name “David”, but he didn’t want to omit his other son. So Parker removed the first name completely and to this day, Spenser’s first name remains unknown and rarely referred to.
After earning a BA degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Parker served in the US Army in Korea. In 1957, he earned his Master’s degree in English literature from Boston University and then worked in advertising and technical writing until 1962. Parker received a PhD degree in English literature from Boston University in 1971. His dissertation, titled “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality”, discussed the exploits of fictional private-eye heroes created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
Parker wrote his first novel in 1971 while at Northeastern University. He became a full professor in 1976, and turned to full-time writing in 1979 with five Spenser novels to his credit.
Career
Parker and his wife created an independent film company called Pearl Productions, based in Boston. It is named after their German short-haired pointer, Pearl.
Parker created female detective Sunny Randall at the request of actress Helen Hunt, who wanted him to write a part for her to play. He wrote the first book, and the film version was planned for 2000, but never materialized. However, his publisher liked the character and asked him to continue with the series.
According to critic Christina Nunez, Parker’s “inclusion of [characters of] other races and sexual persuasions” lends his writings a “more modern feel”. For example, the Spenser series characters include Hawk and Chollo, African-American and Mexican-American, respectively, as well as Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, a gay cop, Lee Farrell, and even a gay mob boss, Gino Fish. The open homosexuality of both his sons gives his writing “[a] sensibility,” Ms. Nunez feels, “[which] strengthens Parker’s sensibility [toward gays].”
Aside from crime writing, Parker also produced several Western novels, including Appaloosa, and children’s books. In 1994 he collaborated with Japanese photographer Kasho Kumagai on a coffee table book called Spenser’s Boston, exploring the city through Spenser’s “eyes” via high quality, 4-color photos. In addition to Parker’s introduction, excerpts from several of the Spenser novels were included.
Note that there is another Robert B. Parker (1905-55) whose mystery novels of the 1950s are being reprinted by Hard Case Crime.
Awards
Parker received three nominations and two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He received the first award, the “Best Novel Award” in 1977, for the fourth novel in the Spenser series, Promised Land. In 1990 he shared, with wife Joan, a nomination for “Best Television Episode” for the TV series B.L. Stryker; however, the award went to David J. Burke and Alfonse Ruggiero Jr. for Wiseguy.
In 2002 he received the Grand Master Award Edgar for his collective oeuvre.
In 2008 he was awarded the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award.
Books by Robert B. Parker include
Some books by Robert B. Parker
Death
Parker died suddenly of a heart attack, sitting at his desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 77.
January 29th, 2010 § § permalink
Leil Lowndes
LEIL LOWNDES is an internationally acclaimed writer, motivational speaker, and corporate trainer. She has spoken, consulted, and conducted training programs in every major city in the US and many abroad. Leil has written 7 books and 6 audio programs on all types of interpersonal communicating. Her books have been translated into 18 languages, and she has received testimonials from dozens of top communicators.
Leil’s teen-age bouts with shyness explain the passion she brings to her subject. Her later experiences as a starring Broadway actress explain her electrifying presentation. Her extensive training in Psychology explains her rare insights. Her twelve years of conducting corporate training programs and her profound knowledge of interpersonal communicating explain her company’s impressive track record. As president of Applause, Ltd., Leil has clients in a wide range of industries: The Walt Disney Company, Kodak, Dale Carnegie, AmerUS Insurance, Sales & Marketing Council, Young Presidents Organization, Keds Shoes, Folger Coffee, Mattel Toys, L’eggs Hosiery, the government of Bermuda and the U.S. Peace Corps to name only a few. In addition to engrossing audiences on hundreds of TV and radio shows, Leil’s work has been acclaimed by The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine.
(Source: lowndes.com and Applause Ltd.)
Books by Leil Lowndes
Some books by Leil Lowndes
How to Make Anyone Like You: Proven Ways to Become a People Magnet
January 29th, 2010 § § permalink
Jerome David Salinger
Today, as I scrolled down my personal facebook page, many of my friends made mention of J.D. Salinger, who passed away just over a day ago (on 27th Jan). Sometimes some smaller-time author dies and no one notices. So, who is J.D. Salinger then, whose death tucks at the heart-strings of so many readers, young and old?
Salinger is best known for the 1951 classic, Catcher in the Rye. The novel plots about 17-year-old Holden’s experiences in NY City following his expulsion from an elite prep school. He is both an insightful yet unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the “phoniness” of adulthood, and his own duplicity. In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was “sort of” autobiographical.
The New York Times’s hailing of Catcher as “an unusually brilliant first novel” while other criticize the book’s monotonous language and the “immorality and perversion” of Holden, who used religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution. The novel was a popular success and within 2 months of its publication, it had been reprinted 8 times. It spent 30 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller list. The book remains widely read; as of 2004, the total worldwide sales tipped over 65 million copies.
In 1953, Salinger published a collection of 7 stories from The New Yorker. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and For Esmé – with Love and Squalor in the UK. The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success. It spent 3 months on the NY Times Bestseller list
I almost had tears in my eyes when I was reading about the struggles Salinger had to go through before his work was published. I guess in a nutshell, I do respect Salinger for his perseverance. That despite everything, he never gave up doing what he loved to do – writing. Reading on further, I wondered though, if he ever found true peace. His life seemed to have been peppered by so many different beliefs that whatever he did , was usually out of the ordinary, and a little repulsive, to me as an outsider. It seemed he chose to live a lonesome life. Ironically, even in death, Salinger won’t be alone. He has us to contend with in our memories.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
January 29th, 2010 § § permalink
Previously, on 6th Jan, we blogged who the five winners, by categories, of the Costa Award were. Here’s a quick recap :
Costa Novel Award: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibin
First Novel Award: Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
Biography Award: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
Poetry Award: A Scattering by Christopher Reid
Children’s Book Award: Chaos Walking #2: The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
***
In London, Tuesdau. 26th January 2010, the Overall Winner was announed and the award goes to ….. poet Christopher Reid for A Scattering, a compilation of poems dedicated to his late wife, Lucinda Gane. Along with the award, Reid won £30,000.
Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and now lives in London. He studied at Oxford before becoming a journalist and book reviewer. He was Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber from 1991 to 1999, and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hull from 2007 to 2009. He also runs his own independent publishing house, Ondt and Gracehoper, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reid’s poetry collections include Arcadia (1979), which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden prize, Katerina Brac (1985) and All Sorts, his first book of poems for children, which won the Signal Poetry Award in 2000. A Scattering and The Song of Lunch were both published in 2009. A Scattering has also been nominated for Britain’s Forward Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His edition of Letters of Ted Hughes, published in 2007, was recently released in paperback.
Loading ...