![]() Be inspired by a book and share the feel-good power of plants this National Gardening Week.Industry Insights April 2023: Gracie Cooper, Pineapple Lane / Little Toller.Books Fit For A King: Celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III with this collection of books.Full programme announced and tickets go on sale for the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival 26th June to 2nd July 2023.2023 Shortlist Announced for Women's Prize for Fiction.Q&A With Women's Prize for Fiction Chair, Louise Minchin. ![]() 14 Fantastic Books for Deaf Awareness Week – Thought-provoking Non-fiction, and Fabulous Fiction That’ll Thrill You, Chill You, and Stir Your Soul.The 2023 Sports Book Awards, in association with The Sunday Times, announce their shortlists.May 2023 Book Club Recommendation: The Silence Project by Carole Hailey.Sheikh Zayed Book Award Announces 2023 Winners.Prepare to Celebrate the Nation's Favourite Genre with National Crime Reading Month. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Wander through the extraordinary labyrinthine plot on you own - the way is yours to discover. I can be real stubborn about putting off what is good for me!! Cortazar's imagination is boundless, his prose rich and luminous, his wit and sophistication rare, the dialogue brilliant, the plot.I won't attempt to describe that with a few adjectives. ![]() ![]() I read Hopscotch over the period of one summer, after a thirty year delay. Julio Cortazar will take you to places you have never been before in literature, and may never experience again. So, be willing to make a small personal investment in this very special novel, and the reward you reap will be a worthy one. I cannot think of a better companion to devote a few weeks to, maybe even a bit longer - hey, whatever it takes! It depends on your reading speed and the time you take to savor the poetry of the author's language. It has taken me years to sit down and finally make a serious commitment to read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch ( Rayuela in Spanish). ![]() ![]() ![]() We had to see what would happen, and I think that is losing control without losing control, because we take control when necessary. When I started to do public gardens like the High Line and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, we had to work with gardeners and with plants that were, both of them, growing and developing. For someone who is not a gardener, it looks uncontrolled, but it’s not-it’s just that you look more than you act, rather than acting without thinking. It is not that you lose control, but that you start to look differently. At that time we didn’t even think about the birds, but only about aesthetics and how we could extend this beauty through the seasons. We stopped cutting back the plants too early-the skeletons were attractive enough to leave. We found that the best way was to leave plants to go to seed. We started to discuss what we could do to make gardens more attractive not only for ourselves but also as living things. Traditional gardening is a sort of super-control of everything that happens there. Piet Oudolf: I’ve always seen gardening as control. Was that a methodology that was honed in this laboratory of your own garden? I’ve always been interested in the idea of how to negotiate control and not control, or organization and self-organization. ![]() Hans Ulrich Obrist: Piet, it would be great to hear more about your own garden at Hummelo, because I know you’ve left it to change freely with the seasons, in a very organic way. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Scottish writer Ali Smith is surely the most pun-besotted of contemporary novelists, edging out even Thomas Pynchon. There’s a reason that the most abundant writer in the language was so abundant in puns: words, like Bottom’s dream, are bottomless. Being accidental, they are like free money-nature’s charity. Puns are part of the careless abundance of creation, the delicious surplus of life, and, therefore, fundamentally joyful. On the other hand, everyone secretly loves a pun, and, wonderfully, the worst are often as funny as the best, as the great punster Nabokov knew, because the genre is so democratically debased. They lurk, pallidly hibernating, inside fortune cookies and Christmas crackers the groan is the pun’s appropriate unit of appreciation. ![]() Puns are accidental echoes, random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos. They are essentially found, not made discovered after the fact rather than intended before it. If you are tired of puns, are you tired of life? Puns are easy to disdain. ![]() Words aren’t stable in Smith’s fiction: as in Shakespeare, everything is mutable. ![]() ![]() ![]() When Akos and his brother are kidnapped by the ruling Noavek family, Akos is forced to serve Cyra, the sister of a dictator who governs with violence and fear. € —VOYA (starred review)“Roth offers a richly imagined, often brutal world of political intrigue and adventure, with a slow-burning romance at its core.†—ALA BooklistCyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth have grown up in enemy countries locked in a long-standing fight for dominance over their shared planet. ![]() #1 New York Times bestseller * Wall Street Journal bestseller * USA Today bestseller * #1 IndieBound bestseller Praise for Carve the Mark: “Roth skillfully weaves the careful world-building and intricate web of characters that distinguished Divergent. Globally bestselling Divergent author Veronica Roth delivers a breathtaking fantasy featuring an unusual friendship, an epic love story, and a galaxy-sweeping adventure. ![]() ![]() ![]() With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost. Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them-if he doesn't run away from home first. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics. Bordas’s novel, with its humor and sadness, beauty and bluntness, youthful perspective and mature. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist-she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. ![]() ![]() Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent. ![]() ![]() Unfortunately the joy of their mating is overshadowed when Aiden and Meryn find themselves embroiled in a missing persons case assigned to Aiden by the Lycaonian Council. Eventually they discover that life before finding each other may have been good, but life afterwards is perfect, even if it involves super soaker battles and accidentally discharging hand grenades. In the first twenty-four hours she kicks, screams and knocks her bear shifting mate unconscious. ![]() Little does he realize, Fate is sending him his mate first! He meets his destined mate Meryn Evans and things go downhill from there. He likes his world run with military precision. Aiden McKenzie is adamant that he doesn’t need a mate and that she would only get in the way. After gathering all of the warriors together in a fake award ceremony, the witch Elder casts a spell to pull the warrior’s mates to them, whether they want it or not. ![]() They are shocked to discover that many of their sons' mates are out in the world and are human! Fearing that their future daughter in laws will end up dead before being claimed and providing them with grandchildren to spoil, they convince their own mates that something must be done. ![]() When the topic of grandchildren comes up during a weekly sewing circle, the matriarchs of the founding families seek out the witch Elder to scry to see if their sons' have mates. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He survives and decides to make the best of being flat. The book recounts the adventures of Stanley Lambchop after he is squashed flat by a bulletin board while sleeping. The musical was well received and was revived in 2014 for a short tour. It featured a script by Mike Kenny and songs by Julian Butler. In 2009, a musical adaptation, also entitled Flat Stanley, opened at the Djanogly Theatre, Nottingham. ![]() Since Brown's death in 2003, other children's book authors, including Sara Pennypacker and Josh Greenhut, have continued the series under a new name, Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures. Brown did not continue the series until more than two decades later, when he published five more books: Stanley and the Magic Lamp, Stanley in Space, Stanley’s Christmas Adventure, Invisible Stanley, and Stanley, Flat Again! īy 2003, the Flat Stanley series had sold almost a million copies in the United States, and the stories had been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Hebrew. The first book featured illustrations by Tomi Ungerer and was published in 1964. ![]() The idea for the book began as a bedtime story for Brown’s sons, which Brown turned into the first Flat Stanley book. Flat Stanley is an American children's book series written by author Jeff Brown (Janu– December 3, 2003). ![]() ![]() Although Sextus survived the defeat, it is unknown whether he was involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar. This Sextus aligned with the Senatorial Party in the civil war against Julius Caesar. His father, Sextus Quinctilius Varus, was a senator who had served as a quaestor in 49 BC. Varus is generally remembered for having lost three Roman legions when ambushed by Germanic tribes led by Arminius in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, whereupon he killed himself.Īlthough he was a patrician by birth, his family, the Quinctilii Vari, had long been impoverished and was unimportant Ronald Syme notes, "The sole and last consul of that family", Sextus Quinctilius, "had been two years antecedent to the Decemvirs" (i.e. ![]() ![]() Publius Quinctilius Varus ( Cremona, 46 BC – Teutoburg Forest, AD 9) was a Roman general and politician under the first Roman emperor Augustus. ![]() ![]() ![]() Reading “Redux,” which was set in 1969, was like running into an old friend and realizing you never really knew that person the way you thought you did. But I remember that time from a child’s viewpoint. I was born in 1960, which is to say that I actually remember the Sixties because I was too young for chemicals. Updike’s cinematic, journalistic style certainly appealed to me, but what was even more impressive was his firm grasp of American life, with all its foibles, failures and, yes, epiphanies and ecstasies. I finished it before sunrise and I’ve never been the same. ![]() I bought it at the University of Missouri bookstore, took it back to my room and, curious as to why a history professor was assigning a novel, cracked it open. ![]() One of the “textbooks” he assigned us was Updike’s “Rabbit Redux.” God bless my brilliant professor, though I have forgotten his name. Said course focused on America in the 1960s and early 1970s. My introduction to John Updike’s work came courtesy of a history course I took as a junior in college. ![]() The following essay from Kansas City Star books editor John Mark Eberhart begins In Retrospect series’ look at John Updike’s 1981 NBCC winner, “Rabbit is Rich.” ![]() |