5/20/2023 0 Comments A touch of stardust by kate alcott![]() ![]() Although tensions run high on the set, Julie finds she can step onto the back lot, take in the smell of smoky gunpowder and the soft rustle of hoop skirts, and feel the magical world of Gone with the Wind come to life. ![]() Selznick, who is busy burning through directors, writers, and money as he films Gone with the Wind. The young woman has dreams of becoming a screenwriter, but the only job Julie's able to find is one in the studio publicity office of the notoriously demanding producer David O. ![]() When Julie Crawford leaves Fort Wayne, Indiana, for Hollywood, she never imagines she'll cross paths with Carole Lombard, the dazzling actress fromJulie's provincial Midwestern hometown. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmaker comes a blockbuster novel that takes you behind the scenes of the filming of Gone with the Wind, while turning the spotlight on the passionate romance between its dashing leading man, Clark Gable, and the blithe, free-spirited actress Carole Lombard. ![]()
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5/20/2023 0 Comments Exit ghost roth![]() This process of evaluation mimics both the information processing performed by the IRS computers as well as the novel’s sustained dramatization of information overload and relevant versus irrelevant data. performance,” the David Wallace narrative asks its readers to weigh the value of fictional truth over that of supposed non-fiction. By complicating the distinction between the fictional and the real, and by presenting itself essentially as a “nonfiction memoir,” with all that genre’s attendant blurring of the line between “the personal and public, or rather between private vs. ![]() ![]() At the same time, the “Author Here” sections raise those questions within the larger rubric of The Pale King’s focus on bureaucracy, civic duty, and the Internal Revenue Service’s painful transition from, in Wallace’s words, a bastion of “social justice and civic virtue” to something closer to a “for profit business” run by machines. ![]() This essay examines the fictionalized “autobiograph” sections of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, each one of which begins with the phrase, “Author Here.” These sections raise many of the standard questions about the instability of truth and reality generally associated with metafictional self-reflexive writing. ![]() 5/20/2023 0 Comments The bean trees online book![]() ![]() Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what Newt's whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. ![]() About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. ![]() I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. ![]() 5/20/2023 0 Comments Gilded needles by michael mcdowell![]() ![]() The Amulet (1979), Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) and The Elementals (1981) are also set in Alabama and contain similar supernatural themes of revenge and redemption. The twist in the story is that the matriarch is something other than human something that crawled from the red mud of the Perdido riverbank and set her ambitious sights on a man and a town. Blackwater (1983) is a serial of six books that tells the story of the Caskey family’s rise to power in the small mill town of Perdido, Alabama. Browsing the horror section I came across a series set in Alabama. My first introduction to McDowell happened 25 years ago in my favorite used bookstore on Rocky Ridge Road. In between he left his mark on different fiction genres and even rubbed elbows with Hollywood’s Tim Burton through their collaborations on Beetlejuice (1987) and Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). He died in 1999 of AIDS-related illness in Boston, Massachusetts. ![]() McDowell was born in 1950 in Enterprise, Alabama. Unfortunately, he died too soon and too underrated. Well, to be honest, most of our great writers don’t. Never heard of him? It could be the fact that not every great writer makes the New York Times bestseller’s list. The recent 9th annual Alabama Bound at the Central library brought to mind my all-time favorite Alabama author, Michael McDowell. ![]() 5/20/2023 0 Comments The bell jar plath![]() ![]() The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. ![]() The plot parallels Plath's experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempt. ![]() ![]() One must register here an immediate protest at the exclusion of Pitt the Elder. ![]() No Winston Churchill, which is rather refreshing, for that endlessly fascinating figure can sometimes obscure everyone who came before him.īut oddly enough, in the piece for The Times which Seldon wrote about his book, the top eight become the top nine, for Churchill is included. “Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel, Viscount Palmerston, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Clement Attlee, and Margaret Thatcher.” He also concedes that making lists of the best Prime Ministers, though “entertaining”, is also “largely meaningless”, because there are no “agreed criteria on what constitutes ‘success’ for a Prime Minister”.īut Seldon knows which PMs he puts in his top class, worthy of the accolade of being “Agenda Changers”, by which he means they “changed the course of the country, and with it, the way the job of Prime Minister operated”: Ten pages from the end of his 337-page study, Anthony Seldon concludes that “the undoubted challenges” of being Prime Minister “have not made the job impossible”. ![]() ![]() The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister by Anthony Seldon ![]() 5/20/2023 0 Comments The Continuum by Wendy Nikel![]() As the only girl in our neighborhood (besides Sara Cooke, who didn’t count because she was homeschooled by fundamentalists who didn’t let her watch the cartoons we based all our adventures on) I was always Princess Peach, the Pink Ranger, Princess Leia, and April O’Neil. ![]() I’d had a crush on Marcus for as far back as I could remember, since we were kids running around the neighborhood with holes in our pants’ knees, going on pirate adventures and journeys into space. ![]() Older brothers have a way of doing that, asking questions with no right answer: either way, you’re the loser. He and his best friend Marcus had been working on it in our basement for years, and when he asked if I wanted in, in typical younger sister fashion I agreed without a second thought. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I volunteered to be the test subject for my older brother Rob’s time travel experiment. ![]() 5/20/2023 0 Comments Book elizabeth strout![]() ![]() Lucy can remember foraging for food in garbage cans with a cousin outside her small hometown of Amgash, Illinois, and those memories still have the power to wound in Strout’s new novel, Oh William!, in which a considerably older Lucy thinks of children on the school playground pinching their noses and saying, “Your family stinks.” Material squalor was matched by cultural deprivation (no books, magazines, or TV) and emotional starvation. ![]() ![]() Lucy comes from nothing.” It was true, if a bit indelicate. Speaking to one of the guests, Catherine said, “This is Lucy. At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was introduced at her wedding reception by her elegant mother-in-law, Catherine. ![]() 5/19/2023 0 Comments Ramona and beatrice books![]() ![]() ![]() She was slow in learning to read, due partly to her dissatisfaction with the books she was required to read and partly to an unpleasant first grade teacher. When she was 6, her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where she went to grammar and high school. Mouse.īeverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon. ![]() Some of her best known and loved characters are Ramona Quimby and her sister Beatrice ("Beezus"), Henry Huggins, and Ralph S. Her characters are normal children facing challenges that many of us face growing up, and her stories are liberally laced with humour. It wasn't until she was in third grade that she fo Beverly Cleary (ApMarch 25, 2021) was the author of over 30 books for young adults and children. Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon. Beverly Cleary (ApMarch 25, 2021) was the author of over 30 books for young adults and children. ![]() ![]() In an author interview with Tor about The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri said “There’s always been queer science fiction and fantasy. Publishing has made putting this list together a bit easier than it would have been even ten years ago. ![]() I haven’t yet, and trust me when I say I could name 20 books about vampires and vampire hunters falling in love right now without breaking a sweat. Theoretically, I can read the same set of tropes and premises over and over, and I am not sure I will ever tire. In general, if it has a romance with a ghost, reaper, werewolf, witch, robot, or spaceship, I want to read it. I am a bit of a queer SFF romance fanatic. I need all your secret societies that are actually vampires or werewolves or whatever else you want to throw at me. ![]() Give me the introduction scene normal people receive when they learn about all the things that go bump in the night. Marriages of convenience simply work better when the two diverging kingdoms may destroy each other (with magic or robots) if your wedding doesn’t happen. I want a forbidden love that is legitimately forbidden because if they fall in love an ancient magic rains hell upon the earth. In my biased opinion, there is nothing better. Are we here to wrestle with the meaning of humanity and love? Yes, of course we are. ![]() The best queer SFF romance books not only have wonderful queer romance, but also the magic, mystery, and mayhem that accompany science fiction and fantasy. If you swoon at the sight of queer dragons, werewolves, and robots, you have made it to the right place. ![]() |