By: Maryann Yin,
on 4/24/2014
Time has released its list of “100 Most Influential People.”
A number of writers have been included in this illustrious group such as young adult novelist John Green, nonfiction author Barbara Brown Taylor, memoirist Malala Yousafzai, novelist Arundhati Roy, and Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt. Yousafzai actually makes two appearances because she contributed a short piece honoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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Add a CommentIt’s National Poetry Month this April and what better way to celebrate than a chat with author, poet, and creative writing instructor Karen Benke.
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By: Powell's Staff,
on 3/16/2014
At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]
By: [email protected],
on 3/9/2014
After reading Ann Patchett’s This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage I had to go back and read this book. Firstly because I learnt Ann writes non fiction just as beautifully as she does her fiction and secondly she talks in the book about a controversy surrounding Truth & Beauty.
In 2006, Clemson University assigned Truth & Beauty to the freshman class and Ann was invited to give the Convocation Address. However one parent deemed the book inappropriate, the media got involved and mass ignorance ensued. Ann details the events in ‘“The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal”’ in her frank and forthright style, her humour keeping you from boiling with outrage. After reading the book the whole incident seems even more ridiculous and also I sense more hurtful that Ann let on in her piece.
Truth & Beauty is the story of Ann’s friendship with Lucy Grealy. Lucy had a highly aggressive form of cancer when she was a child which left her with a badly disfigured jaw. Lucy had numerous operations throughout her life to try and correct and/or alleviate her disfigurement.
Lucy’s whole life was (rightly and wrongly) dominated by her face. It defined how people treated her and it defined how she saw herself. It was a part of who she was and shaped her as a person, good and bad. It was also a burden that became impossible for her to bear but her friends were always there to help pull her through.
Ann met Lucy at college but they became friends when they both attended the Iowa Writers Workshop together. Their lives and careers became entwined from that day forward. Ann writes about her friendship with Lucy warts and all. The good times and the bad. The times when Lucy was on top of the world and vice versa. How they supported each other through thick and thin and all the difficulties any friendship faces along the way.
Ann tells the story of her friendship with Lucy with clarity and emotion, with honesty and understanding. Heart breaking and gut wrenching. Truth and beauty. Ann Patchett at her best.
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By: Powell's Staff,
on 9/20/2013
At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]
By: Jason Boog,
on 2/1/2013
Why do you write? Author Meredith Maran asked 20 great writers that question, collecting their replies in her new collection, Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do.
On the Morning Media Menu today, Maran shared writing advice she learned while getting responses from Isabel Allende, David Baldacci, Jennifer Egan, Sebastian Junger and Ann Patchett.
Press play below to listen to the whole interview on SoundCloud. We’ve collected a few quotes from the interview as well…
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By: Jason Boog,
on 11/8/2012
On April 23, 2013, 25,000 readers will give away a half million books in the United States to celebrate World Book Night. Below, we’ve listed the 30 books they will give away next year.
If you want to give away books to celebrate the event, follow this link to apply to be a book giver. You must apply before January 23, 2013. Novelists Ann Patchett and James Patterson will serve as the honorary chairpeople of the event and the authors have waived royalties for the books. Here’s more about the event:
volunteer book lovers [will] help promote reading by going into their communities and personally handing out specially printed copies to light or non-readers and to those without the means or access to printed books … The 30 World Book Night U.S. titles for 2013, chosen by an independent panel of booksellers and librarians, were also announced. Thousands of copies of each World Book Night title will be printed as special, not-for-resale paperbacks.
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 10/26/2012
What’s your favorite bookstore? My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop comes out on November 13th, sharing recommendations from 84 writers.
Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, it features bookstores around the country, including The Strand (New York, NY), Powell`s (Portland, OR) and Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA). Publishing industry consultant Ronald Rice and “Booksellers Across America” edited the book.
Contributors ranged from John Grisham to Chuck Palahniuk to bookstore owner Ann Patchett. The book also contains illustrations by Leif Parsons, an introduction by Richard Russo and an afterword by Emily St. John Mandel.
You can find all these bookshops and more in our Best Indie Bookstores on Twitter list.
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By: Dianah,
on 5/8/2012
What if women could become pregnant into their 70s? What if a woman's fertility could be increased exponentially? What if the ever-encroaching biological clock disappeared? Ann Patchett takes us deep into the Amazon in search of answers to these questions in her latest novel. The amazingly long fertility window in the female members of the [...]
By: Jason Boog,
on 4/18/2012
Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James debuted on TIME magazine’s TIME 100 list this year, joining comedians turned writers and Steve Jobs’ biographer on the prestigious list.
TIME editor-at-large Brenda Luscombe wrote: “Six months ago she was Erika Leonard, a mother of two who dabbled in saucy stories for the Web. Now she’s E.L. James, publishing phenomenon, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has deeply stirred booksellers, Hollywood and, apparently, many, many mothers. Reading may never be the same.”
The TIME 100 list also included features about Ann Patchett (written by Elizabeth Gilbert), Walter Isaacson (written by Madeleine Albright), Stephen Colbert (written by Garry Trudeau), Chelsea Handler (written by Kathy Griffin), and Asghar Farhadi (written by Richard Corliss).
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Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James debuted on TIME magazine’s TIME 100 list this year, joining comedians turned writers and Steve Jobs’ biographer on the prestigious list.
TIME editor-at-large Brenda Luscombe wrote: “Six months ago she was Erika Leonard, a mother of two who dabbled in saucy stories for the Web. Now she’s E.L. James, publishing phenomenon, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has deeply stirred booksellers, Hollywood and, apparently, many, many mothers. Reading may never be the same.”
The TIME 100 list also included features about Ann Patchett (written by Elizabeth Gilbert), Walter Isaacson (written by Madeleine Albright), Stephen Colbert (written by Garry Trudeau), Chelsea Handler (written by Kathy Griffin), and Asghar Farhadi (written by Richard Corliss).
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By: Beth Kephart ,
on 3/7/2012
If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, pull away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sentiment: The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.Boy, I needed that.
By: Jason Boog,
on 1/25/2012
Bookstore owner and novelist Ann Patchett wrote the most quoted passage on Goodreads last year in State of Wonder: “Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
During the same period, City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare was the most quoted book on Goodreads. Nearly 130,000 quotes were added to the social network last year–we’ve included a Goodreads infographic linking to all the most popular quotes of 2011.
If you want to share book quotes on Facebook, you can also follow this link to enable Goodreads on your Facebook Timeline. The new app connects with your Goodreads account, making the books and quotes you read a permanent part of your Facebook memories.
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By: Jason Boog,
on 10/14/2011
So far, 224 writers have signed a new Writers in Support of the Occupy Movement petition. What do you think?
The petition is composed of a single sentence: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” So far, the petition has virtual signatures from Alison Bechdel, Samuel R. Delaney, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie and many other authors. You can sign at the bottom of the page.
Earlier today, Occupy Wall Street activists braced for a possible eviction, but the city decided to postpone the scheduled cleaning. (Via Sarah Weinman & Bookforum)
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By: Jason Boog,
on 10/13/2011
The National Book Award finalists were unveiled yesterday and many readers instantly started drawing lists of influential authors who didn’t make the list. Over at Salon, Laura Miller took the most dramatic stance in her essay “How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant.”
She cited four popular novels that the judges passed over: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and The Submission by Amy Waldman.
Here’s more from the essay: “the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.”
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By: Jason Boog,
on 8/3/2011
In 2001, novelist Ann Patchett published Bel Canto, a gorgeous and suspenseful introduction to the world of opera music. If you have a Spotify account, enjoy this playlist collecting 30 songs mentioned in the novel–two hours of writing music.
Here’s an excerpt from Bel Canto, describing the first song on the playlist: “[He] chose Rusalka as a measure of his respect for [the singer]. It was the centerpiece of her repertoire and would require no extra preparation on her behalf, a piece that surely would have been included in the program had he not requested it … He simply wanted to hear her sing Rusalka while standing close to her in a room. If a human soul should dream of me, may he still remember me on awaking! His translator had written it out for him from the Czech years ago.”
Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Ann Patchett Spotify Playlist and our Henry Miller Spotify Playlist. If you have more ideas for a particular playlist, you can always add your suggestions in the comments section–we will update our mix.
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Kelley & Hall had a wonderful time speaking at Grub Street’s annual Muse & the Marketplace. Here is a description of our “hour of power” session, Blueprint for Book Publicity.
What makes a book a blockbuster? What pushes it to the top of bestseller lists, onto bookshelves across the country, and into the hands of eager readers? What helps an author create a strong following? If an author learns the strategies and secrets, can he propel his book in the direction of bestseller status? Do you have to be published by the biggest and best publishing houses in the country in order to make a presence for yourself and your work?
The answers to these questions will surprise even the most cynical of writers. Whether you have already written a book that shot up the bestseller list or are a debut author wondering how to navigate the confusing maze of publicity, this course will provide all of the secrets, tips, strategies and advice that every writer needs to learn. We will help you create the best possible path for you and your work. The advice we offer is lasting, and the suggestions will inspire you to learn every angle of this business from the inside out. We pooled our knowledge from various industries; public relations, sales, advertising and journalism to provide you with the most complete reference for creating a successful and powerful publicity campaign.
It is always inspiring to see so many writers with passionate stories to tell. You never know who the breakout writer is going to be. Last year, at this time, we were there with our client, Lisa Genova, author of STILL ALICE. Since last year’s Grub Street, Lisa has gone from having a self-published book to being picked up by Simon & Schuster and now being a fixture on the New York Times best seller list!
The event is so informative and a great networking tool. Authors at this year’s Muse included Tess Gerritsen, Ann Patchett, Lois Lowry, Sue Miller, Lynne Griffin, Amy MacKinnon, and Jennifer Haigh. I have to admit, I was very sad not to get a chance to meet Lois Lowry. Anastasia Krupnik, was one of the first books I remember devouring as a child and dragging my mother back to the bookstore to get the next book in the series. I credit Ms. Lowry with my absolute, undying, love and passion for books. And now she blogs! It rivals the childhood excitement I felt when I started following Punky Brewster on Twitter (Soleil Moon Frye).
If you didn’t get a chance to attend our seminar, and are interested in learning everything you need to know about marketing and publicizing your work, we are currently working on the only instruction manual you will ever need on book publicity, BLUEPRINT FOR BOOK PUBLICITY. Here’s a sneak peek:
I just read that article this morning. I'll download Ann Patchett's single. She's one of my favorite authors.
This looks good, Beth. I keep saying I must control my Kindle purchases, but I'll take your advice and buy the Patchett!
I did download it and I read half on the subway ride this morning. Thanks for the suggestion :)
Downloaded! Thanks for posting, Beth.
And hi to Sarah: )
Jane Hirshfield's Heart of Haiku appeals to me. I like that as a recommendation. Patchett's writing is something I have a love-hate relationship with, though I haven't read any memoir from her.
Btw, love that table too...the length, the texture, the light...all excellent.