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Okay gang you've all had a chance to see Star Wars The Force Awakens. I know some of you haven't but the time has begun to discuss important things. So if you've seen the movie, go after the jump. If you haven't here's some pictures.

Dr. Martens will release a limited edition 'Adventure Time'-inspired footwear line next month.

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 8 July 2014, Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch, leads a discussion on George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

What was your inspiration for choosing Middlemarch?

I first read Middlemarch at seventeen, and have read it roughly every five years or so since, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my forties, I decided to spend more time with the book and to explore the ways in which it seems to have woven itself into my life: hence my own book, My Life In Middlemarch.

Did you have an “a-ha!” moment that made you want to be a writer?

Not exactly, but getting my first story published in a national newspaper at the age of eleven in a contest for young would-be journalists—and getting paid for it—must have been a motivating factor.

Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?

The best book I can think of that gets into the mind of a thirteen or fourteen year old is Huckleberry Finn, so please may I have Mark Twain?

What is your secret talent?

I used to be able to charm children with my ability to walk on my hands. Then I had my own child, and ever since my balance hasn’t been what it used to be. Luckily, my son doesn’t require charming.

With what word do you most identify?

“perhaps”

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of My Life in Middlemarch and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. She lives in Brooklyn.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook. Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.

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Image credit: Rebecca Mead. Photo by Elisabeth C. Prochnik. Courtesy of Rebecca Mead.

The post Five questions for Rebecca Mead appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Kate Farquhar-Thomson

I look forward to the last week of May every year and 2014 is no exception. To what am I referring? My annual pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye of course.

Every year since I can remember, I find myself in England’s famous book town for the excellent Hay Festival. Now in its 27th year the eponymous book festival can be found nestling under canvass for 11 days in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park. Due to the breadth of our publishing at OUP we are lucky enough to field a great ‘team’ of authors every year at this internationally renowned festival and this year is no exception.

Sharing the Green Room with the likes of Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax, Monty Don, and James Lovelock, this year, will be Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalization and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, who will be speaking about ‘Meeting Global Challenges’. This talk kicks off a series of three talks inspired by the new book Is the Planet Full?  Edited by Goldin, the book has 10 contributors and later in the week talks will also pull out some of the books’ major themes such as ‘The End of Population Growth?’ addressed by Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, ‘Can the World Feed 10 Billion People (Sustainably & Equitably)’ discussed by Charles Godfrey and with Yavinder Malhi who will be looking at the question ‘Bigger than the Biosphere? A metabolic perspective on our human-dominated planet’.

The Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.

A specialist in ancient Greek history, Professor Paul Cartledge will be talking about his latest book After Thermopylae. Illustrating the diversity of the OUP’s contribution to the festival this year and offering something for everyone, the week continues with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones discussing spies and spying; John van Wyhe, who is flying in from Singapore, will talk about Alfred Russell Wallace of whom last year saw the 100 year anniversary of his death; Justin Gregg, who knows a thing or two about dolphins, asks Are Dolphins Really Smart? For the scientists among us Professor Peter Atkins will surely answer the question What is Chemistry? in a fully illustrated talk on the subject.

Frequent visitors to Hay will be familiar with David & Hilary Crystal who have entertained many a festival goer over the years and this year they plan to take us on a literary tour through the UK looking at how the language was shaped by Wordsmiths and Warriors in history.

There is not much Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, doesn’t know about Strategy. And his latest book on the topic gives us a panoramic synthesis of the role of strategy throughout world civilization, from ancient Greece through the nuclear age. He was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997 and more recently, in June 2009, served as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.

During the final weekend of the festival Thomas Weber will bring insight and detail on Hitler’s formative experiences as a soldier on the Western Front when discussing Hitler’s First War and Julian Thomas will discuss ‘The Dorstone Dig‘ where over the last couple of summers, the archaeological team have uncovered two 6,000-year-old burial mounds and the remains of two huge halls that appear to have been ritually burned down.

I, for one, will be looking forward to being entertained and educated during my week at Hay and I hope you are too!

Kate Farquhar-Thomson is Head of Publicity at OUP in Oxford.

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Image credit: Hay Festival site. Photo by Finn Beales.

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Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford is editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, and of The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (The Library of America), on which the comments that follow are based.  She is also the author of From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and imaginative Writing in America, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, and A Historical Guide to Mark Twain.  We asked Fishkin to contribute to the blog in honor of the centennial of Twain’s death.

Ernest Hemingway said in 1935 that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But these days, as scholars increasingly focus on transnational dimensions of American culture, perhaps it’s time to look at Twain’s impact on writing outside of America, as well. The fact that this year marks the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book makes it a perfect time to widen our angle of vision.

If we set out to look for an American author most likely to achieve a world readership, we would be hard-pressed to find a less promising candidate than Mark Twain at the start of his career. The dialect and slang that filled the title story of first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, struck some early foreign readers as impenetrable. And if they found the dialect and slang of Twain’s first book hard to understand, the insults he hurled at them in Innocents Abroad were, as one German writer put it, “unforgivable.” But Twain broke out of the mold with such original freshness that many Europeans who justly could have been offended were intrigued instead. Indeed, I’ve determined that the first book published anywhere on Twain was published

I got a message on MySpace from a girl who hasn't friended me. Her profile is set to private, so I can't respond even to her message. This seems like a glitch in MySpace.

I would really like to be able to speak to her - she lives in Switzerland and has read Shock Point in German, where it is called, oddly enough, "Break Out." (Yes, in English.) Switzerland has three offical languages: German, Italian, and French (depending on which canton, or state, you live in).

Here is what she wrote: "I make a lecture on its book Breakout. Over the book I do not even have some experienced however over their person have I in the Internet something found me make smarter already! I come from Switzerland and therefore could I with your own homepage begin there not much (I can't speak
English). Therefore I wanted to ask you whether it me not some over it tell could when it exactly birthday to e.g. have or like her to the topic came around it into Breakout goes. I cannot understand you if it me to write back.
Nevertheless already once thank-beautifully for a marvelous authoress. (: Many greetings Sabrina"

It's so cool to have a fan in another country! And I could even write her back in my rusty German (which I think is probably better than her English.) I only wish I could write her back. Has anyone else gotten around this problem?





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