Celebrated author Jean Craighead George passed away this week at the age of 92. George published more than 100 books throughout her career, often focusing on the environment and the natural world, most famously in My Side of the Mountain and in her Newbery Medal-winner, Julie of the Wolves.
Jean Craighead George Passes Away
From Flop to Top
Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers (which our own Mark O'Connell reviewed last October), expected Harry Mathews' novel The Journalist to be a "terrible flop," but soon found it was "every bit as great as Mathews' more celebrated novels."
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West Hollywood Library Auction
In addition to signed first editions and fancy restaurant dinners, the silent auction for West Hollywood's new library included a special-edition signature mattress set.
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Tuesday New Release Day
Andrew O'Hagan, whose books have gotten some Booker Prize notice over the years, has a new one out (it's been out in the UK for a while now) called The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, which, as the title perhaps suggests, is told in the voice of Monroe's Scottish maltese poodle called Maf. Also out this week is Tom Clancy's first new "Jack Ryan" thriller in quite some time, Dead or Alive.
A Big Week for Wells Tower
Wells Tower is having himself a great week, and it stands to reason that when he’s having a good week, we’re all having one as well. After all, we get to ponder the potential of the script Tower wrote for You Shall Know Our Velocity, an upcoming film based on Dave Eggers’s novel of the same name. We also get to read Tower’s Garden & Gun piece on “the nervous work of owning – and finally loving – a Chihuahua.” And as though that wasn’t enough already, we also get to savor Tower’s gripping feature story in the latest GQ, “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?”
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Poet Rocker
Paul Muldoon's band, The Wayside Shrines, is the latest project for Paul Kolderie, the Brooklyn-based producer for Radiohead and Pixies. (via)
Tiger, Tiger
The second movie trailer for Ang Lee's upcoming adaptation of Life of Pi by Yann Martel has just been released.
The Shame King
A couple weeks ago, our own Janet Potter reviewed Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a new book which examines the rise of public shaming on social media. In the Times, Ronson takes part in the paper’s By the Book series, several entries of which we’ve written about before. Among other things, he recommends The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Violence by James Gilligan.