UC-Santa Cruz to put novelist Robert Heinlein's archive online

Sept. 21, 2007

The complete archive of renowned American science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein will be made available online, thanks to an unusual partnership of the University of California-Santa Cruz and the Heinlein Prize Trust.

Heinlein, who lived in Santa Cruz for two decades, was one of the grand masters of science fiction. He became a pop icon in the 1960s with the publication of "Stranger In A Strange Land," one of the most successful science-fiction novels ever published. He died in 1988.

The entire contents of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archive - housed in the UC-Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections since 1968 - have been scanned in an effort to preserve the contents digitally while making the collection easily available to both academics and the general public. The digitization project was the brainchild of Art Dula, director of the Heinlein Prize Trust.

The first collection released includes 106,000 pages, consisting of Heinlein's complete manuscripts - including files of all his published works, notes, research, early drafts and edits of manuscripts. The documents offer a window into Heinlein's creative process and provide background and context for his work.

Other collections soon to be added to the online archive will feature Robert and Virginia Heinlein's business and personal correspondence, scrapbooks, photo albums, and unpublished works, including communications with Heinlein's editor and agent.

The Heinlein Prize

The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize announces its longlist

Sept. 17, 2007

The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury today announced its longlist of books in the running for this year’s prize. The jury selected 15 titles out of a record 108 books submitted by 46 publishers from every region of Canada.

Author and 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner David Bergen, author Camilla Gibb and author, poet and artist Lorna Goodison comprised the 2007 jury.

The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist is as follows:

   David Chariandy for his novel Soucouyant, Arsenal Pulp Press
     
   Sharon English for her collection of short stories Zero Gravity, The Porcupine’s Quill
     
   Barbara Gowdy for her novel Helpless, HarperCollins Canada
     
   Elizabeth Hay for her novel Late Nights on Air, McClelland & Stewart
     
   Lawrence Hill for his novel The Book of Negroes, HarperCollins Canada
     
   Paulette Jiles for her novel Stormy Weather, HarperCollins Canada
     
   D.R. MacDonald for his novel Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, HarperCollins Canada
     
   Claire Mulligan for her novel The Reckoning of Boston Jim, Brindle & Glass Publishing
     
   Mary Novik for her novel Conceit, Doubleday Canada
     
   Michael Ondaatje for his novel Divisadero, McClelland & Stewart
     
   Daniel Poliquin for his novel A Secret Between Us, trans. Donald Winkler, Douglas & McIntyre
     
   M.G. Vassanji for his novel The Assassin’s Song, Doubleday Canada
     
   Michael Winter for his novel The Architects Are Here, Penguin Books Canada
     
   Richard Wright for his novel October, HarperCollins Canada, a Phyllis Bruce Book
     
   Alissa York for her novel Effigy, Random House Canada
     

Of the longlist, the jury writes:

“The books on this year's longlist offer penetrating insights into the human condition through strong narrative, depth of character and moral vision. Historic and contemporary worlds are explored in ways that are novel, humorous, surprising and illuminating.”

The shortlist for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced at a news conference on Tuesday, October 9 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. The finalists will be honoured and a winner announced at a gala black tie dinner and awards ceremony to be held on November 6th, 2007.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards $40,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English and $2,500 to each of the finalists. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller and was founded in 1994 by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.

Poems Guevara lived and died by

Sept. 10, 2007

The contents of a green, dog-eared notebook carried by revolutionary Che Guevara when he was shot dead by the CIA in a remote Bolivian village 40 years ago are to be revealed to his adoring fans for the first time. Not political writings or military plans, but a collection of his favourite poetry, written out in his own hand.

As Guevara was yesterday voted 'Argentina's greatest historical and political figure', ahead of the anniversary of his death next month, a publishing house in Mexico launched a book containing the contents of his anthology. 'When Che was captured, the military searched his bag and found two notebooks: one containing secret codes to communicate with Havana and the green notepad,' says Mexican writer and Guevara biographer Paco Ignacio, who wrote the preface to the book.

According to colleagues, he bought the cheap notebook on a trip to Tanzania in 1963 and would retire, often up a tree, to write in it. Publishing house Planeta has refused to say how it obtained the notebook but said that it spent two years verifying its authenticity before publishing. 'It is a very intimate anthology loaded with political poems and poems dealing with emotions, feelings. This adds another element to the myth of Che,' says Ignacio.

Among the 69 poems are some by Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, Cuban Nicolas Guillen and Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, who was one of the century's great poetic innovators.

Javier Espinoza
The Observer

Myth and imagination dominate teenage fiction prize

Sept. 9, 2007

Slavery and the occult feature in Mal Peet's Brazilian-based The Penalty.

Mal Peet, Philip Reeve and Meg Rosoff head a shortlist for the 2007 Booktrust Teenage Fiction Award, announced earlier today, which demonstrates the strength of contemporary youth fiction. They are joined on the shortlist for the £2,500 prize by Theresa Breslin, Kate Cann and Marcus Sedgwick. The chair of judges, librarian Angela Wilkinson, saluted the "wide range of excellent contemporary teenage fiction available today".

"Any one of these well-crafted novels would be a worthy winner," she said, "showing storytelling at its finest with characters and places that linger in the mind long after the final page has been turned."

The shortlisted books range from an irreverent reworking of Arthurian myth to a Bildungsroman set in Luton. Philip Reeve, who won last year's Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with A Darkling Plain, is nominated for Here Lies Arthur, a brutal Dark Ages tale which re-imagines Arthur as a bullying tyrant, Guinevere as a pale, old woman, and Merlin as the true magician of the piece - the wily bard who can transmute all this mud and gore into the stuff of legend.

Another Guardian children's fiction prize winner, Meg Rosoff, is nominated for her second novel, Just in Case. Here she wrestles with questions of fate and survival as she follows a boy in flight from an early brush with death. The Carnegie Medal - winner Mal Peet makes the list with The Penalty, a football story which investigates the legacy of slavery in the corruption of modern Brazil.

The rest of the list is made up of Theresa Breslin's Renaissance thriller, The Medici Seal, Kate Cann's dose of teen gothic, Leaving Poppy, and Marcus Sedgwick's return to the bloody roots of vampire myths, My Swordhand is Singing.

The new director of the reading charity Booktrust, Viv Bird, said she was "thrilled" by this year's entry. "These books are guaranteed to inspire and grip the imagination of any reader," she said.

Last year's winner, Anthony McGowan, will join Angela Wilkinson on the judging panel alongside the journalist Tom Gatti and the school student Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft. The winner of the 2007 award will be announced at a London ceremony on October 31.

Richard Lea
Guardian Unlimited

Bloomsbury Auction House - World's Leading Auction House for Rare Books - Makes U.S. Debut in New York This Month

Sept. 6, 2007

Bloomsbury Auctions, the world's leading auction house for rare books, is opening its first U.S. location this month at 6 W. 48th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. The inaugural auction will take place on Wednesday, September 26 at 2:00 p.m.

The auction will feature the Pamela and Richard M. Estes Collection comprised of fine bindings and illustrated books dating from the 15th to 20th centuries. Most notable in the collection is The Kelmscott Chaucer, one of only 48 surviving copies. With type and decorative borders designed by William Morris, one of the greatest English designers of the 19th century, the book is expected to fetch upward of $100,000.

"We are delighted to be opening a Bloomsbury Auctions office and saleroom in New York," says Tommaso Zanzotto, Chairman of Bloomsbury Auctions. "Our formidable team of experts have an unrivalled wealth of knowledge and welcome connoisseurs and novices alike. Our aim is to become a thriving center for books and works on paper in a city where books and book collecting have a long and distinguished history."

Viewing begins on Thursday, September 20 and continues through Wednesday, September 26. The hours are 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Thursday and Friday; 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday; and 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday. The viewings and auction are free and open to the public.

Bloomsbury Auctions was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in London with salerooms in Rome and New York. It began as a book auctioneers but has grown steadily and today specializes in not only books, but also printed and written material embracing prints, maps, watercolors, photographs and collectables.

Press Release: Bloomsbury Auctions

Room to Read takes social entrepreneurship to new height

Sept. 5, 2007

Eight years ago, John Wood found his raison d'etre during a visit to a school in rural Nepal. Disheartened to see an empty library yet touched by the enthusiasm of its teachers and students, he vowed to go back with books. From this small personal goal stemmed one of the largest nonprofit educational organizations in the world, Room to Read (R2R), which Wood founded in 2000 after nearly a decade as a top executive at Microsoft. He was 35.

While such life-changing decisions certainly come at no small cost, Wood considers his a trade-up.

"Yes, it has been a financial sacrifice, ... and I work more hours and I travel more than I've ever travelled. But in my heart I'm much happier," said Wood, who is also R2R's CEO, during a Taipei press event yesterday at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT).

The Time Magazine Asia's Heroes Award recipient and Draper Richards Foundation Fellow is in town at the invitation of an international think tank to share his experience with R2R, and discuss how he applied key business lessons from one of the most successful companies in the world to one of the most pressing problems in the world -- the lack of basic literacy

He sums up his work of social entrepreneurship as "taking the compassion of Mother Teresa and combining it with the focus and the tenacity of a for-profit blue-chip company ... but having a social return of the investment, and just leaving the world a better place."

In the developing world today, there are 800 million people who cannot read or write, Wood said. On top of that, there are 100 million children between the ages of five and 10 who are not enrolled in school -- two-thirds of which are girls.

"It is for this reason that I left Microsoft in 1999 after being in Nepal and delivering books on the back of a yak to a rural village ... to devote the rest of my adult life to bringing this life-long gift of education ... to children across the poorest parts of the world," he explained.

The Connecticut native attributes his parents as a source of inspiration for his decision to start R2R.

"My parents always told me that if you make a lot of money that does not make you a good person. What makes you a good person is what you do with that money. So I was taking their lesson," he said.

And, "leaving Microsoft to devote your life to philanthropy is now such an important trend that Bill Gates has decided to follow my example," he added with a laugh as he joked about his ex-boss.

Read the full story here
By Erika Wang, The China Post

On the Road celebrates 50 years

On the Road, Jack Kerouac's ode to youth, freedom and infinite possibility, turns 50 this week, but it gives no sign of shuffling off into obscure middle-age. Jack's back and ubiquitous.

Viking, which published the 1957 novel to immediate acclaim and best-sellerdom, has released a spanking-new hardcover edition. For serious Kerouac junkies the publisher offers a companion volume, On the Road: The Original Scroll, which reproduces the book as Kerouac famously composed it in a three-week frenzy of writing — one unbroken paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper he later taped together to make a 120-foot scroll. Fresh commentary may be found in Why Kerouac Matters by New York Times reporter John Leland, also from Viking.

Finally, Library of America, publisher of "America's best and most significant writing," on Thursday releases Kerouac: Road Novels, 1957-1960, which brings together On the Road, The Dharma Bums and three lesser-known books, plus selections from Kerouac's journals.

So what is it about On the Road? What grabbed the public imagination in 1957? Does it speak to readers today? What does it say to them?

Whatever it says has little to do with On the Road's plot, which meanders like a Hill Country deer track. The book has the aimlessness of real life because it springs from real life. In 1946 in New York, Kerouac, the 24-year-old son of French-Canadian immigrants and an aspiring novelist, met 20-year-old Neil Cassady. Kerouac, a Columbia University dropout, already knew Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the three forming the nucleus of what came to be known as the Beat Generation writers.

Cassady was something else. A westerner, he'd grown up on Denver's mean streets. His mother was dead, his father a drunk. Cassady had spent time in reform school for car theft. But he wasn't simply a handsome bad boy, although he was that. He had energy, charisma, and an autodidact's insatiable curiosity. Kerouac, like others, found himself smitten.

Between 1947 and 1950 Kerouac made a series of road trips across the United States, by bus, car and thumb, sometimes in Cassady's company, sometimes not, passing through Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, Houston and Mexico City, among other places. These trips form the basis for On the Road. In the novel Kerouac morphs into Sal Paradise, the narrator, while Cassady becomes Dean Moriarty. Ginsberg and Burroughs appear under transparent pseudonyms.

Besides moving, moving, moving, Sal, Dean and friends don't do a lot in On the Road. When they finally get someplace and stop, they tend to sit around, drink and engage in directionless conversation. Don't look for charged drama here. The motion is the message.

Above all, On the Road is a book for the young. The characters are young and obsess over things young people obsess over — breaking free of adult society, living for the moment, finding themselves, learning about life. Make that Life.

"It's a liberating book," says Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the Library of America volume and is writing a biography of Kerouac.

"Kerouac said every day can be Saturday night. Every day can be one of revelry and highs. You can live a subsistence, Thoreauvian kind of way and have a richer life."

On the Road tapped into something nascent in its historical moment and gave it voice and power. Which makes the book maybe not great but certainly important.

Read the full article here
By FRITZ LANHAM
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Darwin books on display in Chicago

Sept. 1, 2007

CHICAGO -- An exhibit on books authored by Charles Darwin entitled The Origin of Darwin's Revolution is open through Oct. 28 at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

The exhibit presents the background for Darwin's book, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" -- one of the most influential books in the field of natural sciences. It brings together books by Darwin and his colleagues selected from the Rare Book Collection, which holds approximately 3,000 titles from the 15th to the 19th centuries, and from several private collections.

Darwin’s principle of natural selection is a vital component of current research in the Institute for Plant Conservation Biology at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

First-edition books on display include:

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Charles Darwin.

Narrative of the surveying voyages of his Majesty’s ships Adventure and Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe Robert Fitzroy, editor.

Journal of researches into the geology and natural history of the various countries visited by HMS Beagle Charles Darwin.

CRS
West of Eden Books