Maud was on a year end panel with Jessa of Bookslut, Michael Orthofer of the Complete Review, Alex Good of Goodreports and Robert Birnbaum of Identity Theory. The panel was given five topics to discuss: Feel-Good Story of the Year; Enough Already!; Under-Reported Story of the Year; The Apocalypse is Upon Us; Books of the Year; and Predictions. Their responses are here.
Literary Mama has a profile of author Ayelet Waldman.
Like [the protagonist of her novels] Applebaum, Waldman found staying at home with children isolating and boring. It’s a story Waldman has often told. After her second child, Isaac, was born, she decided to become a law professor, so she could live a less crazy life and have more time. She got a part-time gig teaching law school. But every time she sat down to work on her law review article — a necessity for tenure — “it was a catastrophic experience.” She found herself unable to write, uninterested in or intimidated by the academic approach to legal issues she still cared passionately about. So, in 1995, she decided to take a few years off and be a stay-home mom. “That lasted about a minute,” she says. “Seriously. I mean, I did it, I stayed home, but I got depressed. Definitely depressed. So I started writing while my son was taking his naps to make myself feel better about what I was doing.”
Read the rest here.
Marquette University, which owns the original manuscript for The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, is set to acquire a host of secondary Tolkien sources.
I’ve been trying to see House of Sand and Fog, but it’s only playing in one screen in L.A. (Century City) and I’d rather not brave the hordes of holiday shoppers to get to it. I’m very curious to see how Ben Kingsley portrays Colonel Behrani. The reviews so far have been mixed.
Publishers’ Lunch has the scoop on Google Print, a new feature that will allow Google to go head to head with Amazon’s Search Inside the Book. Here are the FAQs, and a sample search.
Writing is good for you.