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Which five words best describe Twenty Yawns? Jane Smiley: Cheerful, colorful, loving, amusing, relaxing.

Jane Smiley’s writing is fantastic. She eases you into the family she has created and before you know it you are completely sucked into the story. You will fall in love with each character in a different way and share in the highs and lows of their lives. The big historical events, that are so […]

I missed this book last year and picked it up after a customer raved about how this and it’s sequel were among the best books they had ever read. And after finishing this she may well be right! This is the first book in The Last Hundred Years trilogy. Book two, Early Warning, is already […]

61 authors and 14 artists have made annotations to some of their most beloved works for the First Editions/Second Thoughts (FEST) auction. The funds from this venture will benefit the PEN American Center.

The writers added in features to first edition copies of their books such as notes, essays, sketches, photos, and letters to the reader. The artists had a choice of re-making either a monograph or an important art piece.

All of the artwork and annotated books will be put on public display at Christie’s New York starting November 17th. The auction itself will take place on December 2nd.

The New York Times has an exclucisve video starring Robert A. Caro, Paul Auster, and Jane Smiley who talk about the experience of re-reading their own books (embedded above). Click here to watch another video for more details about the auction event.

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Life is one thing and then another, one day and soon the next, ambition superseded by surprise, desire thwarted by the reality we didn't forecast. Sometimes we get out in front of life. Oftentimes, we don't.

So here's the question: Where, in all of this, is the plot? The conflict and the climax? The sure cause and the clear effect? The resounding resolution? Life is successive and iterative; it is not inherently themed or arced.
How audaciously delicious, then, that Jane Smiley has turned her considerable talents to a trilogy called "The Last Hundred Years" — and that she means it. One hundred years, one hundred chapters, the first 34 of which can be found in Book 1, titled "Some Luck." It's the Langdon family saga, the story of an Iowa farm and the people who inhabit it, the fences that stitch, the horizons that beckon, the love that lives in plain sight and inside a child's biscuits.

"Some Luck," simply and impossibly enough, is the story of what happens next.

While the Los Angeles Review of Books won’t officially launch until late 2011, the literary criticism publication unveiled a preview site today.

The site opened with “The Death of the Book” by Ben Ehrenreich. The site will be updated with daily content, including Geoff Nicholson writing about silent film star Buster Keaton, Jane Smiley exploring the work of novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford, and Jefferson Hunter writing about private detective novelist Ross Macdonald and oil spills.

Here’s more about the new site: “The complete Los Angeles Review of Books site, launching in late 2011, will be much more complex and multidimensional, featuring reviews and essays, reader discussion forums, video of author interviews and events, an IMDB style archival reference database for the book world, and much more, taking full advantage of the latest web technologies. Reviews of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, philosophy, art, science fiction, young adult, children’s and more, will have multiple links leading through the site, allowing readers to follow their inclinations into new territories, finding new books, authors, and genres.”

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