I’m pausing on abortion, J.A.I.L. and similar posts to catch up on a few miscellaneous items from the last several days:
- First, a prior Marginalia update: AlterNet has posted an excerpt from the Center for Constitutional Right’s book, Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush. (Via Blog of a Bookslut).
- E.L. Doctorow’s The March, a fictionalized account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous (or infamous) Civil War march through Georgia and the Carolinas, won the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction. Other winners included Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the 1986 nuclear disaster, for general nonfiction and Kai Bird’s and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus, a biography of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer for biography.
- Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for fiction. One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick won the nonfiction award. My review of Beasts of No Nation is here.
- Warner Brothers has acquired the film rights to Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, a book that would easily rank among my all-time favorites. (Via Big Dumb Object). The report indicates it was acquired for a production company owned by Brad Pitt. There have been rumors for quite awhile that Pitt would get the starring role in any film project for the book, which is somewhat odd since the lead character (a Jesuit priest) is Puerto Rican.
- I had not heard of it before but the online magazine The Morning News has an annual Tournament of Books. (Via Maud Newton).
- On the shopping list for my next airline flight: Fourth Amendment shipping/luggage tape. (Via Boing Boing).
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter’s wives.
Don’t know how it all got started,
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives.
“Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
