Bulletin Board
- The South Dakota Humanities Council has announced the lineup for the 2011 South Dakota Festival of Books. The Festival is October 7-9 in Deadwood.
Bookish Linkage
- The South Humanities Council is working with Penguin Books to produce a special edition of this year’s One Book South Dakota, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History by Joseph Marshall III. The front cover of the edition will feature the South Dakota Center for the Book logo and a “2011 One Book South Dakota Selection” banner.
- We have an early candidate and strong favorite for book title of the year.
- “When we read, we psychologically become part of the community described in the narrative—be they wizards or vampires. That mechanism satisfies the deeply human, evolutionarily crucial, need for belonging.” (via)
- NYC libraries say porn use in library protected by First Amendment.
- How rock music is saving books. (via)
Book Awards Linkage
- First published in Swedish in 1982, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, translated by Thomas Teal into English, won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award for fiction.
- Having won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the L.A. Times 2010 book prize for fiction. Other winners included Michael Short for The Big Short (nonfiction), Laura Hillenbrand for Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (biography), and Thomas Powers for The Killing of Crazy Horse (history).
- South African author Lauren Beukes has won the Arthur C Clarke award, the U.K.’s top science fiction prize, for her novel Zoo City.
- The 2011 Hugo Award nominations were announced — and four of the five Best Novel finalists are women. I, of course, have read none of them.
Nonbookish Linkage
- Dakota Women launches Jan-Jo Watch.
- Check out Swap4Schools.
- I wonder if E.T.s understand the concept of playing music when placed on hold?
- Superman renounces his U.S. citizenship
- Although not usually an appropriate comment for an obituary, I hope someone drives a stake through the heart of this evil creature.
- How America became the land of Truthers, Triggers, Birthers, and Dan Brown fans
Reading … is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction[.]
David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading
