Naki (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
R. Gregory Christie is a three-time Coretta Scott King honor recipient. He’s illustrated numerous picture books, including the biographies of many significant historical and cultural figures — Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Sojourner Truth, Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, to name a few. And he also created the cover art for my novel, Loving Donovan. Saturday, I had the pleasure of finally...
The ArchitectsNewspaper Blog (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GLASS HOUSES Word on the street is that Chicago’s modern design auctioneer extraordinaire Richard Wright and Philip Johnson Glass House executive director Christy MacLear have been spending time together. That’s a lot of design obsession for one relationship, we’re just sayin’. Moreover, what about the poor flooded Farnsworth House? Wright, it seems, [...]...
Booker Rising (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
The conservative Republican columnist calls for a paradigm shift in Black America (hat tip: Black & Right ): "Bigger Thomas' body count continues to grow; 16-year-old Derrion Albert is just his latest, and perhaps most tragic victim. Bigger Thomas is the fictional anti-hero of Richard Wright's classic novel Native Son . Bigger bullies members of his gang, murders a white socialite and his...
Writing and Ruminating (Free subscription) | 09/28/2009
As most of you already know, I no longer do memes. That way, I don't have to worry about tagging people, etc. But I have taken the time to look at the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 novels, and to put the ones I've read in italics. The ones in bold? Yeah - they've all been banned or challenged at one point or another, according to the ALA. 42% of them have been banned or challenged over the years....
Texas Oasis (Free subscription) | 09/27/2009
Read a banned book, or just be aware of the reasons that books are challenged for their right to be in libraries or classrooms. Top three reasons for targeting a book: 1. the material was considered to be "sexually explicit" 2. the material contained "offensive language" 3. the materials was "unsuited to any age group" Reasons for challenges from 2001 through 2008 (24%...
Jessica Schneider (Free subscription) | 09/22/2009
I just started reading this bio on Richard Wright the other day and it is written by Margaret Walker, who is listed on Cosmo's Neglected Poets page. You can see the book below: I'm not as familiar with Walker as I am with someone like Brooks, for example, but I have Walker's book of poems, though it has been years since I read it. Overall, Brooks seems to be technically better, but this of course is...
Woody Haut's Blog (Free subscription) | 09/08/2009
I am a real sucker for WPA guide books. They give a glimpse of a time in the not so distant, one in which my parents came of age, when federal programs took people off the dole onto the government payroll. Moreover, some excellent writers helped put the guides together, writers like Algren, Ellison, Cheever, Rexroth, Steinbeck, Meridel Le Seur, Zora Neal Hurston, Weldon Keyes, Louis L'Amour, Richard...
Mysterious People (Free subscription) | 09/03/2009
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948 The role of a writer is not to say what...
What's Left in the Church (Free subscription) | 09/03/2009
There are always lists of books purporting to be what one should read. There are also books readers love. A friend of mine sent me along a link that puts them side by side. 1. ULYSSES by James Joyce* 2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald* 3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce* 4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov* 5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley 6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William...
Erik's Choice (Free subscription) | 08/17/2009
If you go to Paris in your imagination or in person, Permanent Parisians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris by Judi Culbertson & Tom Randall (1986+) is a handy book to bring along. I've used it three times while walking around the great Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, which was created by Napoleon I in 1804 and "houses" all sorts of people (or in some cases the...
Tinfish Editor's Blog (Free subscription) | 08/16/2009
Years ago, around the turn of the last century, as one might say, I bought a copy of Richard Wright's haiku via the internet. It wasn't that I was a Wright fan, though Native Son had a big impact on me in high school. Nor was it for love of haiku, a form I appreciate mainly in the abstract (though I'll be teaching haiku in a few short weeks). I got the book of Wright's haiku because we were admitting...
chris (Free subscription) | 07/24/2009
Lynn, some people thought you were the second coming of Richard Wright. Some people thought your were our version of Sidney Sheldon, popular but crappy. Some people thought you were an undercover crusader--showing the black community a distant mirror of the ugliness it reflects on issues of gay life. Some people thought you weren't forceful enough, or opened up our "dirty laundry" of life...
Seattle Times (Free subscription) | 06/22/2009
Intiman Theatre's newly announced co-artistic director Kate Whoriskey, who will take over from the Tony-winning Bartlett Sher in 2011, says the next five-year American Cycle will include plays based on Richard Wright's "The Invisible Man" and John Irving's "The World According to Garp."
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