Thu, Jan 29, 2009
John Updike, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, short story writer, critic and poet died of cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76. The following poem, entitled Requiem, is his own. It will be featured in "Endpoint and Other Poems," not yet released. Updike's last novel on audio, "The Widows of Eastwick" is reviewed in this issue along with "The Witches of Eastwick" which was first published 25 years ago.
Sat, Jan 24, 2009
Iain Lawrence is the author of numerous acclaimed novels for young people. He lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia.
Sat, Jan 24, 2009
Michael Harvey is the creator, writer, and executive producer of the television series Cold Case Files, as well as an Academy Award-nominee for his documentary Eyewitness, and is a former investigative reporter for CBS. He earned a law degree at Duke and a masters in journalism from Northwestern. He alsoowns a bar inChicago.
Sat, Jan 24, 2009
Faye Kellerman is the author of twenty-five novels, including nineteen New York Times bestselling mysteries that feature the husband-and-wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. This is her first novel for teens and her first time writing with her daughter.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
Francine Prose is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the nonfiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. She is the president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
Sherrilyn Kenyon, who also writes historical romances under the name Kinley MacGregor, is the international and New York Times bestselling author of several series, including The Dark-Hunters, the B.A.D. series, Brotherhood of the Sword, and The MacAllisters. Also an award-winning web designer, she lives with her husband and sons near Nashville, Tennessee.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
John and Jean Silverwood live with their family in California.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis ‘86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the bestselling author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Battle Cry of Freedom, which won the Pulitzer Prize, For Cause and Comrades, which won the prestigious Lincoln Prize, and Crossroads of Freedom.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
American novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington, (July 29, 1869 – May 19, 1946) won a Pulitzer Prize for Alice Adams in 1922.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
Ted Bell is the former Vice-Chairman of the board and World-Wide Creative Director of Young & Rubicam, one of the world's largest advertising agencies. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Hawke, Assassin, and Pirate.
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania and died of cancer on January 27, 2009. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Highlights of his life, including photographs, a slideshow and a videotaped interview can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28updike.html?ref=opinion
Catherine Murdock is the author of Dairy Queen, its sequel The Off Season, and the forthcoming Front and Center. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband, two children, and several cats, and regrets to report that she has never flown a broom, though not for lack of effort. Princess Ben is her first fairy tale.
M.C. Beaton, who writes popular historical romances under her real name, Marion Chesney, has written 20 Agatha Raisin mysteries.
C. J. BOX is the author of four novels featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. His debut novel, Open Season, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the prestigious Anthony Award, as well as nominations for the Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Neil Gaiman is the author of the New York Times bestselling children's book Coraline and of the picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean. He wrote the script for the film MirrorMask and is also the author of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and short stories for adults, as well as the Sandman series of graphic novels. Among his many awards are the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
'Halima Bashir was born into the remote western deserts of Sudan in the region of South Darfur, to the fiercely independent Zaghawa tribe. She went on to study medicine, and at age twenty-four she returned to her tribe and began practicing as their first ever qualified doctor, until Janjaweed Arab militias began savagely assaulting the Zaghawa, invariably with the backing of the Sudan army and air force. She now lives in England with her husband and young son where she continues to speak out about the violence in the Sudan.
Philippa Gregory is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance. A writer and broadcaster for radio and television, she lives in England.
Mohammed Hanif heads the BBC’s Urdu service. He graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy and has since worked as a journalist and playwright. He lives in London.
Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was an accomplished painter and architect, but it is for his illuminating biographies of artists that he is best remembered. George Bull translated widely from the Italian during his lifetime, and also wrote several books on the Renaissance period.
Stewart O’Nan is the author of eleven novels, most recently Last Night at the Lobster, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction.
Fri, Jan 02, 2009
KAY HOOPER is the award-winning author of Sleeping with Fear, Stealing Shadows, and more than ten other novels of suspense and intrigue along with dozens of other books. She lives in North Carolina, and is working on the third book in her Blood Trilogy
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
The recipient of two Lifetime Achievement Awards (from the James Beard Foundation in 2000, and the IACP in 2004) and a knighthood from her own country, Marcella Hazan is the author of six classic cookbooks published over the past thirty-five years. She lives in Longboat Key, Florida, with her husband, Victor, her lifelong collaborator and writing partner, himself an authority on Italian food and wine.
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
Francois-Marie Arouet (Pen name: Voltaire; 1694-1778) spent his life both delighting and annoying his contemporaries. His satire was aimed mostly at religion and politics, sending him into exile for 23 years and into jail from time to time. An enemy of tyranny, Voltaire was a genius of the Enlightment.
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
Chrisopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of fifteen previous novels, including the award-winning Full Dark House, and four other Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, White Corridor, The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, and Ten Second Staircase. He lives in London.
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
Bill Pronzini has published sixty novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and twenty-nine in his popular "Nameless Detective" series. Pronzini has received three Shamus Awards, and six nominations for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries.
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
Carol Cassella, a freelance medical writer and a practicing anesthesiologist, grounds her haunting debut novel Oxygen in the life-or-death scenarios of the modern medical field. Marie Heaton’s successful anesthesiology practice is derailed when a child dies under the mask. Faced with a major lawsuit, she must turn to a former lover for moral support.
Thu, Jan 01, 2009
Pat Barker is one of England's most important contemporary novelists. Union St, her first novel, was published by Virago in 1982 to huge critical acclaim. Barker won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1993 and the Booker Prize in 1995. She lives in Durham.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
Sir John Clifford Mortimer, who died on January 16, 2009, was a British playwright, novelist, bon vivant, and former practicing barrister. His works include twelve collections of Rumpole stories, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He also wrote three acclaimed volumes of autobiography. He is pictured here with bewigged actor Leo McKern, who immortalized the role on television.
I was blown away by Paul Hecht's outstanding reading of Late Nights on Air by Canadian media journalist Elizabeth Hay (see my review of the audiobook in this issue), and I thank Recorded Books and Paul Hecht for affording me the opportunity for an interview.
Elizabeth Hay’s fiction includes A Student of Weather, a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Ottawa Book Award, Garbo Laughs, winner of the Ottawa Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Small Change (stories). In 2002, she received the Marian Engel Award. Hay worked for cbc Radio in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto. She lives in Ottawa.
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