Bedtime Story

At last! Print large enough for me to read without my specs!

Japanese book jackets

Odd Book Titles

theBookseller magazine has announced the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year:

• I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
• How to Write a How to Write Book
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
• Cheese Problems Solved
• If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

Malcolm Lowry's Volcano

On this day in 1947 Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was published. Lowry began the book where it is set, in the Cuernavaca region of Mexico in the late 30s, but it had been a full and difficult decade in the making -- a handful of rewrites, many handfuls of rejections, a nearly disastrous fire, a divorce, and mostly a desperate struggle with alcohol that would at one point drive him to drink olive oil in the mistaken belief it was hair tonic.

Lowry wrote some of Under The Volcano down the street from my home in Niagara on the Lake.

Book Ads Slideshow

The Golden Age, 1962-1973

It Was A Dark & Stormy Night

The game for people who love to read:

You and your friends will have fun—and some great conversation—testing your book smarts. Just listen to the opening line or two from a book and identify its title or author. It’s that easy…and that challenging!

Via Coudal

Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Novels On Line

Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre’s Digital Collection of Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Literature aims to restore this ‘lost’ body of literature to view. In partnership with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the J. C. Beaglehole Room at Victoria University of Wellington, we aim to produce a comprehensive on-line collection of nineteenth-century New Zealand novels.

Via Grow a Brain

Novelist Richard Ford Leaves Knopf for HarperCollins

Should this matter to me? It doesn't.

In a surprise move, Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land,” has switched publishers for his next three books. New York Times

Top 10 Bizarre Literary Deaths

10. Ambrose Bierce
9. Leo Tolstoy
8. Virginia Woolf
7. Euripides
6. Sherwood Anderson
5. Hart Crane
4. Edgar Allan Poe
3. Sergei Esenin
2. John Berryman
1. Yukio Mishima

Details here via Presurfer

Everything you ever wanted to know about Gertrude Stein

I'm not a big fan of Gertrude Stein but I remember being quite impressed by how modern Paris, France seemed to me and I quite liked it.
Duane Simolke’s Gertrude Stein Links Page.
Via Wood's Lot