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Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Let’s dive straight in with a whopper:

Neil Gaiman interviews Terry Pratchett over at BoingBoing on his latest, Snuff. And the Guardian has a Portrait of the Artist Michael Morpurgo (War Horse, to name but one title of his). Oh, and they also have a Q&A with Helen Castor (She-Wolves).

R. I. P. Last week grande dame of Dutch literature Hella S. Haasse (The Tea Lords and three others are currently available in English) died, aged 93. You can read obituaries here and here (both in Dutch).

Amy Winehouse fans: Amy’s father Mitch is to publish a memoir about her, with all proceeds to go the charity set up in her name. The book is due to be published next summer.

Should you happen to be in London tomorrow, head over to Waterstone’s Piccadilly at 9 am to help Anthony Horowitz and at least 289 others break the world record for relay reading. If you want to be well-prepared, read the story here first, so you don’t stumble over your line.

Video! Cressida Cowell answers questions about and reads from her latest Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III book, How To Steal A Dragon’s Sword.

Lists! For the upcoming NaNoWriMo’ers: 10 Best-Selling Books That Were Originally Rejected, and for the rest of us 9 Movies Totally Different From the Books They Are Based On (thank you flavorwire.com).

Awards! The ever-baffling Daggers were handed out this past weekend, or some of them, in any case (even the CWA site has a hard time keeping up, as it proclaims “Last Three Daggers Awarded”)(all the others happen throughout the year, I think). I’ll just tell you which three books won, and leave you to follow the link and figure out what for, exactly: Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson, The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. The Forward Poetry Prize 2011 was won by John Burnside for his collection Black Cat Bone (the Forward website doesn’t have the announcement up yet, but the Guardian does). The Thurber Prize (for American Humor) went to David Rakoff for Half Empty.

Pre-orders for the Steve Jobs biography (titled, not iSteve, but simply Steve Jobs ) have gone up by 42000% since the announcement of his death. It will be on sale October 24th.

And finally, even though each picture breaks my heart a little bit more, rather beautiful natural silhouettes carved into books by Kylie Stillman (via buzzfeed.com) as well as mysterious paper sculptures found at several Scottish libraries (thanks Ellyn for the link!):

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

I read his blog every day, but it didn’t occur to me until Hayley pointed it out to list this here: in honor of Neil Gaiman’s blog’s seventh birthday, American Gods has been made available to read online (in its entirety) for free. A poll was held on his website to decide which book his fans wanted te have access to for free, and this won the vote with 28 %. He also has some thoughts ‘the nature of free‘.

Video! In 2001 the Swiss Ambassador to the U.K. had the luminous idea to invite Banksy to redo the Embassy’s underground garage. See a clip here (the buffering on my computer was a bit horrendous but still worth the view).

A graphic novel depiction of the Holocaust is now used in classrooms in Germany.

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Congratulations to Erwin Mortier and Paul Verhaeghen, who have been longlisted for the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize with Shutterspeed (Sluitertijd) and Omega Minor (same title in Dutch), respectively. The shortlist will be announced next month.

Here’s an article speculating on when, exactly, Dan Brown’s next book will be published. The man himself stays mum on his site, though, sadly. I can tell you that the next novel is tentatively called The Solomon Key, and has been assigned a publication date (by us) somewhere in 2018 because, surely, by then it might have been published?

For all you Stephen King lovers eagerly awaiting (or already reading) his new book The Duma Key, there’s an interview with him here, and a video of him talking about it here.