Oct 1 2007

The Sweet, Terrible, Glorious Year I Truly, Completely, Lost It, by Lisa Shanahan

I don’t know much about Australian entertainment. My knowledge of their popular culture is limited to Strictly Ballroom, a single episode of Kath & Kim I caught in England, and an Australian romance novel that I read a few years ago, which featured such outdated sexual politics that I originally thought it was written in the sixties...

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Oct 1 2007

It's that time of year again

Welcome to Banned Books Week!Looking for a banned book to read? Lucky for you, there's no reason to leave the house: half the childhood classics on your bookshelf have been banned or challenged ...

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Sep 28 2007

Shindig!

If you're going to be in the D.C. area tomorrow, be sure to check out the seventh annual National Book Festival. It's free and open to the public, and will feature such Wordcandy-approved authors ...

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Sep 27 2007

Michael A. Stusser

Michael A. Stusser is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and game inventor. His (semi) non-fiction book The Dead Guy Interviews is one of our Featured Book titles.

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Sep 27 2007

The Dead Guy Interviews, by Michael A. Stusser

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I still have my battered middle school copy of DK Publishing's Chronicle of America. It’s held together with duct tape and prayers, but I’m going to keep it forever. The Chronicle was a massive ...

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Sep 27 2007

Stay gold

The New York Times is currently featuring an essay about S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders, which is enjoying its fortieth anniversary this year.While Hinton's West-Side-Story-esque melodrama has ...

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Sep 26 2007

Odds and ends

Please note that if you missed out on the season premiere of Gossip Girl last week, don’t worry: iTunes has the pilot episode available for free download.CNN.com is featuring a list of strange and...

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Sep 25 2007

Manga releases galore

I’ve been having some irritating manga experiences lately, so I'm happy to see that there will be volumes of all three of my favorite mangas coming out in the next few weeks:1. Volume 13 of The W...

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Sep 24 2007

Sequel news

We've had about a zillion search string hits this month from people looking for information on the sequel to Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy. So here's a compilation of what (little) we know:1. T...

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Sep 21 2007

History Lesson for Girls, by Aurelie Sheehan

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Aurelie Sheehan writes with delicate, lyrical precision, her characters are memorable and three-dimensional, her sense of time and place imbues every page... and if she'd shown the tiniest bit of self-restraint...

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Sep 19 2007

East Coast does O.C.

Have you been feeling the lack of crazy fashion, spoiled teens, social outcasts, trendy music, underage drinking, awkwardly flirtatious "banter", and brooding underdogs? Well, buck up, 'cause it'...

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Sep 19 2007

Unshelved

We’ve run across a few great librarian-oriented websites during our years at Wordcandy, but we’ve never seen anything quite like Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes’s Internet comic strip Unshelved. This ...

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Sep 18 2007

Nora returns!

Well, autumn is rollin' in, so it must be time for another Nora Roberts trilogy. Her upcoming novel Blood Brothers is due out on November 27th. Here's the publisher's description:In the small vi...

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Sep 17 2007

I covet...

We've blogged before about Penguin's Graphics Classics reprints, but their recent edition of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers is so awesome that it's worthy of its own post:Dumas's story is ...

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Sep 16 2007

Melissa Marr

Melissa Marr is the author of Wicked Lovely, a YA fantasy that’s one of our Featured Book Picks. While Wicked Lovely has a lot in common with Holly Black’s urban fairy tales, Marr’s world is slig...

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Sep 16 2007

Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr

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Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr’s debut novel, is a YA gothic fantasy that falls somewhere between Holly Black’s gritty, atmospheric fairy tales and Stephenie Meyer’s angst-filled Twilight series. Marr’s book has its weak spots, but this modern Tam Lin adaptation is more than entertaining enough to overcome them...

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Sep 14 2007

Beauty soothes (my sinuses)

I have a brutal head cold today, so, rather than posting the book review that I promised on our newsletter (trust me, nobody wants to see me edit things while under the influence of cold medicine)...

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Sep 13 2007

Wear 'em with pride.

Check out this cute Madeline shirt, available for a paltry (okay, not really) $24.50:Aside: This has no literary significance, and I don't think I'd actually wear it, but I also really like their ...

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Sep 12 2007

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007)

We were very sorry to hear that Madeleine L'Engle, author of the mind-bogglingly awesome children's classic A Wrinkle in Time, died last Thursday. Ms. L'Engle lived to a ripe old eighty-eight, an...

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Sep 11 2007

An Infamous Army, by Georgette Heyer

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It's been decades since American audiences have seen decent editions of Georgette Heyer’s books. While British readers were enjoying the beautiful reprints Arrow Books released a few years ago, A...

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Sep 11 2007

Who knows?

We're always looking for new and different ways to store books here at Wordcandy, and this Invisible Shelf seems like an interesting possibility. Visually, I love it, and I can see how it would be...

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Sep 10 2007

The Spanish Bow, by Andromeda Romano-Lax

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In 2001, journalist Andromeda Romano-Lax began researching a nonfiction account of the life of the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. While Casals's history was fascinating, as Romano-Lax did further research she discovered that there was another story—actually, several other stories—she wanted to tell...

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Sep 7 2007

To Scotland, With Love, by Karen Hawkins

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Karen Hawkins has written another story in her MacLean Family series--this one's called To Scotland, With Love, and it's about a thousand times better than her previous effort...

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Sep 6 2007

Mysterious.

I've been wondering: how do Korean Internet novels work, exactly? I was totally unfamiliar with this term until a few years ago, but then I started watching K-dramas, and they're all about the in...

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Sep 5 2007

Lucky, lucky English people.

The Sadler's Wells Theatre in Islington is staging a ballet adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones's novel Black Maria*. Here's their official description:Thirteen year old Mig’s family head to Cranbury...

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Sep 4 2007

Tomoko Ninomiya

Tomoko Ninomiya is the author of the fantastically awesome manga Nodame Cantabile, one of our Featured Book picks. Nodame Cantabile has been turned into a live-action Japanese soap opera and an a...

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Sep 4 2007

Nodame Cantabile Vol. 1, by Tomoko Ninomiya

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Smart, weird, and irresistibly funny, Tomoko Ninomiya’s Nodame Cantabile is one of our all-time favorite mangas. This coming-of-age story about a group of budding classical musicians will have particular charm for readers who’ve had some musical instruction, but Nodame Cantabile is worth reading even if you’ve never so much as plonked out Chopsticks on your neighbor’s piano...

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Sep 4 2007

Additional!

Achewood.com imagines Harry Potter's future, and it's not a pretty sight.

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Sep 4 2007

At least the cover art is cool

Seeing Redd, the sequel to Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars, is out in bookstores now. While I was impressed by Mr. Beddor's original concept for this series (it doesn't pay to get too picky...

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Sep 3 2007

Looks kinda like an open grave, doesn't it?

Behold, it's Swedish artist Malin Lundmark’s "Library Bathtub":I don't know about you guys, but I'm having some trouble picturing myself relaxing against that huge slab thing.[Source]

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