Everything you need to set up your own book club…
Tag: 10.01.12
Injured Singer Says Met Opera Has Turned Its Back On Her
“Wendy White, the veteran Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano who fell from a platform during a performance nearly a year ago, has still not recovered from her injuries and feels abandoned by the company she once considered family, her lawyer said on Monday.”
Giller Prize Shortlist Includes Thuy, Ferguson, Richler
“The finalists for the $50,000 prize, which celebrates the best Canadian work of fiction in English (or translated into English) of the past year,” include humorist Will Ferguson, memoirist Kim Thuy, novelists Alix Ohlin and Nancy Richler (second cousin to Mordecai), and journalist/short story author Russell Wangersky.
Libya’s Film Industry Begins To Emerge From Qaddafi’s Long Dark Night
“There was no film-making culture here at all under [the late dictator],” says one director recently returned to the country. “He didn’t want anybody to be more famous than him. Even the football players had just numbers on their shirts, because he didn’t want anyone to know their names. He certainly wasn’t going to let anybody be a film director.”
Historian Eric Hobsbawm, 95
The lifelong Marxist thinker’s “four-volume history of the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning European history from the French revolution to the fall of the USSR, is acknowledged as among the defining works on the period.”
Writers’ Campaign Saves Manchester’s Library Books From The Pulp Mill
“A campaign by the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and a number of other literary names to stop the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books at the UK’s largest municipal library appeared to have succeeded.”
Top British Poetry Prize Goes To US Woman For First Time
“Jorie Graham has become the first American woman ever to win one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry accolades, the Forward prize for best collection, beating Oxford’s professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill to take the £10,000 award.”
What Exactly Is Reality? (Or Should That Be ‘Reality’?)
“What do we actually mean by reality? A straightforward answer is that it means everything that appears to our five senses – everything that we can see, smell, touch and so forth. Yet this answer ignores such problematic entities as electrons, the recession and the number 5, which we cannot sense but which are very real. It also ignores phantom limbs and illusory smells.”
How Do We Know For Sure There Is Reality?
“Philosophers are not being rude when they describe the approach most of us take as naive realism. After all, when they cross the street on the way to work, they tend to accept implicitly – as we all do – that there is an external reality that exists independently of our observations of it. But at work, they have to ask: if there is, how can we know?”
The Crucial Advantage Professional Book Reviews Have Over Blogs
“Such a review will usually run somewhere between 500 and 1,500 words. Before publication, it will be subjected to a prolonged and intense process of subediting. Crucially, it will be signed, and usually paid for. … None of this guarantees that such a review will not be savage, destructive, ad hominem or partisan, but it will be considered”.