Hair. Leslie Patricelli. 2017. Candlewick. 26 pages. [Source: Review copy; board book]
First sentence: I have a hair. I take care of my hair.
Premise/plot: If you're not familiar with Leslie Patricelli's board books--especially if you're a parent with littles--you need to be. The star of this one will be a familiar face to those who have loved--or LOVED, LOVED, LOVED her delightful series. In this one, the baby will be getting a hair cut. Literally one hair cut.
My thoughts: I adore Leslie Patricelli's books. I do. This BABY has long been beloved. So it is great fun for me to see the release of two new books this year. (The Other is Nighty-Night.)
Definitely recommended for families with toddlers.
© 2016 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
Telltale Games, the developer behind The Walking Dead game, have announced a new partnership with Marvel to develop a console and PC game in 2017.
The Marvel end of the announcement commented on the quality of Telltale’s work, “It takes a long time to find the right partner. We have one special game we’re excited about.” Their previous games include Tales From the Borderlands, Walking Dead, and Vertigo comic based game The Wolf Among Us.
Recently, Telltale announced an investment by Lionsgate towards developing a new transmedia experience that would utilize both video games and television.
Telltale’s blog only had the image and this statement:
Announced this evening in San Francisco, we’re excited to reveal an all-new partnership with the incredible team at Marvel Entertainment. We’ll be teaming up on the development of an upcoming Telltale game series project set to premiere in 2017!
We’ll update with more information as it comes in…
Olga Slavinova, author of 2017, and one Russia's leading literary figures, will be in New York for a series of events next week sponsored by Causa Artium and The Overlook Press.
There will be THREE separate opportunities to meet Ms. Slavnikova, at which she will read from her works, answer questions, and talk with guests:
IN NEW JERSEY
Friday, 20 May 2011, at 6:30 pm
At the Museum of Russian Art (MoRA)
located at 80 Grand Street, Jersey City, NJ.
IN BROOKLYN
Sunday, 22 May 2011, at 1:30pm
At the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library building in the Dweck Center
located at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY.
IN MANHATTAN
Wednesday, 25 May 2011, at 6:45 pm
With special guest
Marian Schwartz, award-winning translator and translator of the Overlook edition of
2017.
At the Jerry Orbach Theater (entrance on the south side of West 50th Street)
located on the third floor at 1627 Broadway, New York, NY.
All these events are FREE, and in ENGLISH and RUSSIAN. Each event will be accompanied by a reception, an opportunity to talk with the author in a more informal setting.
Olga Slavnikova's award-winning novel 2017 is reviewed by K.E. Semmel in Three Percent, a fine website devoted to international literature:
"It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open
2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the collapse of the Czarist autocracy and gave rise to the Soviet Union. It’s against this backdrop that readers enter this novel: a pot brimming with precious stones, a dash of spy novel intrigue, and a raw-to-the-bone social critique bubbling and boiling in a dense, evocative stew.
Excuse the metaphor. This is not a novel of food—far from it. But
2017 is a novel that asks you to savor it slowly, bite by bite. Translator
Marian Schwartz, one of the most accomplished Russian translators working today—who has translated the works of Nina Berberova, Edvard Radzinsky, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others—has recreated Slavnikova’s dense novel in a smooth, eminently enjoyable English text. Passages describing the craft of obscure trades like gemcutting or rock-hounding flow from sentence to sentence with ease, making the translation seem effortless.
At its core, 2017 is a deceptively simple novel that explores the notion of authenticity in a modern life. In the mythical region of the Riphean Mountains, a gifted gem cutter named Krylov meets a woman named Tanya who, unbeknownst to him, happens to be the wife of his rich but humorless mentor, the professor and gem trader Anfilogov. Krylov and Tanya begin a torrid affair that finds them in new beds each time they meet. Meanwhile Krylov’s ex-wife, Tamara, a wealthy and powerful funeral director who still has her eyes set on Krylov, enters the picture and thinks it’s about time she and Krylov get back together again. And what about that rotund spy trailing Tanya and Krylov’s every move? Well, he may or may not have been hired by Tamara to keep track of their affair.
2017 is, in short, a playfully fun novel that uses farcical elements and outlandish, oversized characters to beguile you into reading further. For instance, in one particularly fun sentence, Dickens-like in its wit, we get the following description of the spy: “His mustache looked like it had been drawn on by a graffiti artist provoked by all the blank space on his face.”
But behind the farce there’s some serious stuff going on. In a geographically isolated northern region of the country where some of the very best deposits of precious stones are found, people, animals, and vegetation are dying because of a cyanide leak. Just why this is so—and just who is to blame for the leak—is what ultimately propels the novel’s plot.
In the post-Soviet society Slavnikova envisions, it seems most everyone is out to make a quick buck. Take Professor Anfilogov, for example, who is driven to accumulate wealth despite the fact that, once he has it, he has no real use for it. Or Krylov’s ex-wife Tamara, whose funeral business rakes in the dough until an environmental scandal breaks, revealing just how she got her money in the first place. (And yes, the scandal’s got something to do with why everything’s dying up north.) Only Krylov the gem cutter—a man with some real inertia issues—seems immune to the pull of easy wealth.
But along with wea
Olga Slavinikova's award-winning novel 2017 is reviewed in the upcoming issue of Russian Life magazine: "Krylov is a young and extremely talented gem cutter who is obsessed by transparency, with the luminous quality of rubies and other precious stones. He is also obsessed by the mysterious Tanya, with whom he has a prolonged, bizarre affair founded on exceptional uncertainties, and who — he fantasizes — will help him (as soon as he has enough money) escape the prison that is his life. But this is the centenary of the October Revolution, and reality and fantasy, past and future, hopes and hazards, are getting hard to separate. This is a Russia of the future, where the country’s harsh realities, ecological disasters and criminality have become amplified with time. Krylov, who just wants to slough off his violent, criminal exoskeleton, finds instead that his life is getting increasingly complicated, that the noose is tightening and there may be no way out. 2017 is a novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, yet set in the mineral- and myth-rich Urals. Slavnikova’s prose is dauntingly dense in the first third of the novel, and it is difficult to slog through her layering of back stories, but the payoff is well worth it. Marian Schwartz’s translation is opulent and lucid, belying the countless linguistic knots she had to unravel in order to birth this dense Booker-winning novel into English. In short, a gem."
