There's a nice synopsis of St. Nicholas here (as mentioned in previous post). From it, we've gleaned our fun fact of the day: "A number of children whose names would later be famous had their first publi-cations in the St. Nicholas League: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Faulkner, Ring Lardner, and Eudora Welty..." Wishing a very merry birthday to our darling daughter,...
Some of the seniors in my workshop have been asking me to share my writing that is available, online and otherwise. I am sending this out to them in an email, and I thought I'd share it here as well. It's from my CV (minus the education and curricular activities): Curriculum Vitae Julia Gordon-Bramer Awards and Nominations: 2009 Margaret Leong Children’s Poetry Award – Second Place for...
Actor Hal Holbrook has been honored for his portrayals of Mark Twain. It was 174 years ago today that the man who is, perhaps, my favorite writer of all time was born. His birth name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is better known to history by his pen name — Mark Twain. He always said the name came from the lingo of Mississippi riverboats, on which he worked in his youth. When a riverboatman...
I’m thankful for … Having Furman Bisher as a decades-long guest for Thanksgiving dinner, a morning visitor delivered to our doorstep to remind us that, as William Faulkner wrote, “You always wear out life long before you wear out the possibilities of living.” Bisher’s Thanksgiving Day column is a yearly reminder of life’s daily pleasures and endless possibilities....
Forgotten Books: A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson In the course of a year I usually read twenty or twenty five novels that impress me. Some for characterization, some for story, some for milieu. But I rarely read a novel that astonishes me. When Robert Charles Wilson's first novel A Hidden Place appeared as a Bantam paperback original in 1986, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I received it...
By Werner Haas, West Hollywood, California (November 23, 2009) Reasons God exists not for me.The passing of Howard Jacobs. If anyone was due a long and happy life, it was Howard.Sara Palin; Here is a harridan that William Faulkner would love to have created, yet here she is, raking in millions for a book she didn't write about a life she didn't lead.
It wasn't long after talk show host Oprah Winfrey 's announcement of her intention to retire in 2011 that publishing insiders began referring to her departure as " a blow " to the industry, one from which it would be difficult if not impossible to recover. "We probably won't see something else to match its overall potential impact on book sales in the broadcast arena any time soon,"...
How many esteemed American movies satisfy the following conditions? • Derived from a novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author; • Made within a year of the book's publication; • Shot with evocative distinction in and around the author's hometown; • Recruited the author's favorite riding horse for a conspicuous role; • Pleased the author but failed at the box-office despite overwhelmingly...
"In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O'Connor's] collection 'The Complete Stories' was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest's 60-year history." The competition was formidable: collected stories of John Cheever, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as well as Ellison's Invisible Man and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow....
We’ve been watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War and last night we finished the episode that includes the battle of Gettysburg. And when the story Pickett’s Charge, the historian Shelby Foote, the shy-eyed, slow-talking baritone who is the star of the narrational portions of Burns’ documentary, refers to a quote from William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust about how for young...
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
So as many of you guys already know, Carson picked his top ten loglines . In case you haven't heard about this yet, Scriptshadow, the guy who reviews a screenplay a day and who's blog you should be reading if you are serious about the craft, put up a contest to select a good screenplay from among his readers. First, you submit your logline and he picks 10 he'd like to read. Then, you submit your first...
Author of 12 novels set in the fictional town of Stay More In a series of 12 remarkably inventive novels set around the mythical town of Stay More in Arkansas's Ozark mountains, Donald Harington, who has died of cancer aged 73, constructed a fictional world that drew inevitable comparison to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Yet Harington's Ozarks provided him with a distinctive language and...
A long and eventful day draws to a close and which included two contrasting male film personalities. Today we live is a 1933 released film of a William Faulkner story, set in England in the first World War, of love and heroic self sacrifice starring a young Joan Crawford, a mature Gary Cooper with Robert Young and Franchot Tone. Joan Crawford, as Diana, has grown up with her brother and his friend,...