Sandra Cisneros is a Mexican-American novelist, poet, and short story writer. Her books include The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, and Woman Hollering Creek. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Macarthur “Genius” Grant.
The first female Mexican-American writer to have her work published by a mainstream publisher, Cisneros has seen her books translated worldwide and The House on Mango Street remains required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country.
(Source: makers.com)
The Moth presents: Nathan Englander
Oprah answers fans' questions about her latest book club choice
Fans ask Oprah what she thinks of Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, and why she chose it. Click the link to watch her video responses!
Story-signing Strategies
ASL & English Literacy
Anna Karenina Official Trailer - Keira Knightley (HD) (by MrTrailersOfficial)
Another film adaptation for this year.
This is the video by the Troy Library that was linked in the last post - I thought it was good enough/awesome enough to get its own standalone post.
For deaf/hoh followers - the transcribe audio is not perfect, but it is decent enough to capture the gist of what the video is discussing.
The Influencing Machine: A Brief Visual History of the Media
via Brain Pickings:
One of the coolest and most charming book releases of this year, The Influencing Machine is a graphic novel about the media, its history, and its many maladies.
Written by Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of NPR’s excellent On the Media, and illustrated by cartoonist Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine takes a refreshingly alternative approach to the age-old issue of why we disparage and distrust the news.
Gladstone (in the video above):
…what victims of the syndrome have lost: identity. They no longer know who they are. They have shattered themselves into fragments and projected the shameful bits onto the influencing machine. That is my metaphor for how we see the media. We feared the telegraph, the radio, the television, the computer. Heck, Socrates even disdained writing. But I believe the media are mirrors, a mess of mirrors. And what we fear is not the machine, but the reflection.
FJP: This just made my day! Wonderful, creative, exciting, intelligent, and so true. —Jihii
“Uncertainly, doubt, questioning. These are the innermost workings of literature. They are the writers’ true instruments. Is there any other mechanism that can sustain such extended and complex examination of ambiguity as a novel? That is what it was born for. In the digital world ambiguity is a bug or flaw to be worked out. In literature, it’s a chance to expand the definition of being.”
—Nicole Krauss, telling it like it is, at the 2011 PEN Awards Ceremony in New York
Bill Nack, an American journalist & sportswriter, recites the closing lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Arguably Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, Gatsby was published on this day in 1925.
Was Battle Royale the inspiration for The Hunger Games? Michael Mirasol tackles this question in the above video essay. You can also read the text version here.
