'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
How do writers and other artists create their work? Our library of mental images includes visions of poets communing with nature, novelists burning the midnight oil whilst scribbling away in cold and lonely attics, composers tinkling phrases on the piano then dashing the notes down as their minds race with inspiration.
"Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead" (Alfred A. Knopf), by Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg has the ear, and the eyes, of the country's book buyers.
Robert Gellately's incisive work could well be titled, "Stalin's Worst Blunder." It is the story of how his rejection of Marshall Plan aid in 1947, both for the Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations falling under its domination, precipitated the Cold War and eventually led to the economic collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Indira Ganesan's "Sweet as Honey" could be said to be about marriage, but like Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," which supplies this novel's epigraphs, it is also about love and families and, ultimately, about the passage of time and the ways we experience it.
"Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief" (Alfred A. Knopf), by Lawrence Wright
If you like descriptions of food, people eating and drinking champagne and an attractive portrait of Marseille with bits of plot sprinkled in, then Peter Mayle's new novel, "The Marseille Caper," may be for you.
Reading reviews of art exhibitions in distant metropolises can evoke envy for pleasures and excitements that are impossible to share because the locations are too far away. So a collection of exhibition reviews could seem frustrating rather than enticing, especially when the once-assembled pictures have returned to their homes. But it's excitement rather than frustration that seizes the reader of "Always Looking: Essays on Art" by the late John Updike because these reviews are so intelligent, well-informed and beautifully written.
The title of this book about the U.S-Mexican War (1846-47) gives away the author's bias. It is lifted from a statement Ulysses S. Grant made in 1867, 20 years after the war ended.
Da-da-da-daaa! Who does not know the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? But who knows that the symphony does not actually begin with that first dramatic da, but with -- of all things -- a rest?
Add another book for possible holiday gifts: Oprah Winfrey's latest 2.0 selection.
"Dolly," one of the 14 stories in Alice Munro's "Dear Life," opens with the narrator and her husband, Franklin, a famed poet, planning their deaths.
Jack Gilbert, a prize-winning poet known for his clear and subtle verse, has died at age 87.
Ashbel Green, a versatile and respected editor at Alfred A. Knopf who persuaded Gabriel Garcia Marquez to switch publishers, worked on Walter Cronkite's memoir and a foreign policy book by President George H.W. Bush and helped discover the crime classic "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," has died at age 84.
The London Daily Telegraph recently published an article about how Adrian and Gillian Bayford of Haverhill, Suffolk, winners of $233.7 million in the lottery, "showed the money hasn't gone to their heads" by taking their first overseas family holiday on the cut-rate airline easyJet.
Alfred A. Knopf announced that Gilbert died Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif., after suffering for years from Alzheimer's disease.
