Apr 24
2005
(Information complied with the assistance of Colleen, an University of Oregon reference librarian, and Eric Gjovaag, webmaster of the The Wizard of Oz Info website. Many thanks to both of them!) ...
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Apr 24
2005
John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain stories about Tom, his brilliant and conniving older brother, are a series of charmingly offbeat tall tales. According to Fitzgerald, Tom was the youngest con man...
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Apr 24
2005
Bram Stoker was a mediocre Irish playwright and theatrical manager who produced exactly one memorable book: 1897's Dracula. It has been suggested that Stoker's horror story was inspired by a comb...
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Mar 29
2005
English author Mary Norton was the author of two children's literature classics: the Borrowers series and Bed Knob and Broomstick, which inspired the (...sigh) Disney film of the same name. Norto...
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Mar 29
2005
Laura Zigman was one of those authors whose first book, 1998's Animal Husbandry, came out hot on the heels of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, and because it was also a story about a romanc...
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Mar 29
2005
British humorist Jerome K. Jerome's stories are like slightly sub-par P.G. Wodehouse novels. (Ordinarily that would be a criticism, but most of Wodehouse's stories are works of such staggering ge...
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Mar 29
2005
I love Beverly Cleary's books. Mostly because they're awesome, of course, but also because Ramona, Beezus, Ellen, Henry Huggins, and all their friends live in the same neighborhood that my late, ...
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Mar 29
2005
Contrary to popular myth, Edward Gorey was not British. In fact, he only traveled outside of the United States once, on a trip to the Scottish Isles. Gorey was born in Chicago in 1925, he studie...
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Mar 20
2005
Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey are the co-authors of Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes, two classic memoirs that no one from a large family should miss. Frank Jr. an...
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Mar 20
2005
Although he had worked as a writer for comic books and radio and his novel The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award in 1953, Alfred Bester was never really what you'd call a household name. Be...
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Mar 20
2005
Bill Watterson is the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes, in Watterson's own words, was about "private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of cer...
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Mar 20
2005
David Macaulay is the author of a series of semi-fictional books about how things are built. His stories about the construction of cathedrals, castles, mosques, and pyramids, all of which are ill...
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Mar 15
2005
Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly, a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies at Fordham University. Ms. James is one of the few absolutely reliable writers of historical romances....
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Mar 15
2005
To paraphrase Jane Austen, there are few romance novelists whom I really love, and fewer still of whom I think well. Eloisa James is one of the few writers whom I both love (well, more or less) and think well of—at least well enough to shell out the full cover price for, an honor that I reserve for a mere handful of authors. Her eight romance novels are fresh, well written twists on old favorites...
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Mar 2
2005
I enjoy books about home restoration. I once wrote a term paper passionately defending Martha Stewart's status as an American icon. I have a serious crush on Alton Brown and an even more serious one on Red Green. And while I am rarely tempted to actually attempt any of the projects that I read about or see on television, I always find the sight of other people creating stuff to be tremendously satisfying...
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Feb 28
2005
A teacher for 32 years, Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote and re-wrote her first book, The Boxcar Children, testing it out on her students until she had honed it into a story that was both easy to re...
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Feb 28
2005
Pilot, poet, and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had one of those adventurous, emotionally messy lives that produce remarkable art but always seem to end badly. (And early.) Sure, he wrote and...
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Feb 28
2005
For a state that I associate mostly with soy bean farming and Biodiesel, Minnesota is peculiarly rich in Wordcandy goodness. A surprising number of famous American authors (Garrison Keillor, Laur...
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Feb 28
2005
Ballet Shoes is the first and best novel in Noel Streatfeild’s 10-book-long series about the lives of British child actors in the first half of the twentieth century. (Only a few of these books h...
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Feb 28
2005
Born in 1912, writer and critic Eleanor Cameron is best remembered as the author of the charmingly bizarre Mushroom Planet books. The first book in this imaginative, entertaining series, 1954’s T...
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Feb 13
2005
Comic book writer and artist Bill Willingham has achieved Wordcandy-status based on the sheer awesomeness of Fables: Legends in Exile, his current series for Vertigo. In Willingham's Fabletown, a...
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Feb 13
2005
Scottish author, physician, and Spiritualism expert, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Although one might quibble over the true literary "ge...
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Feb 13
2005
It is rare for me to recommend a writer of historical romances that feature a pre-Regency setting. I'm sure that there are plenty of very entertaining books out there with medieval or Elizabetha...
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Feb 12
2005
Neal Stephenson, like fellow Wordcandy authors Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt, occasionally seems like he's written entire novels for the sole purpose of flaunting his intelligence and bone-deep hipne...
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Feb 11
2005
Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract is quite possibly the world's most prosaic romance novel. If bodice-ripping paperback covers make your eyes twitch, if soppy love stories leave you feeling fain...
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Jan 26
2005
From fairy tales to Edward Gorey, we here at Wordcandy have long enjoyed stories about bad things happening to good children. British author Joan Aiken has been a steady contributor to this fine literary subgenre, from the 1962 publication of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to the recent (posthumous) publication of the last book in her Wolves Chronicles, The Witch of Clatteringshaws...
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Jan 24
2005
Wilkie Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, and his books, while less famous, share many of Dickens’s strengths. (Collins was also less of a tool on the personality front, apparently.) ...
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Jan 24
2005
Like A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, Scottish author Sir J. M. Barrie's most famous work walks a fine line between preciousness and genuine fun--and manages, most of the time, to keep its ba...
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Jan 24
2005
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
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Jan 24
2005
As with pretty much all fantasy stories published in the past decade, Herbie Brennan’s Faerie Wars series is routinely compared to Harry Potter, although the two series have almost nothing in comm...
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