Mark's Contemporary Literature Blog September 2007 Archive

Anyone in or around Washington D.C. should stop by the National Book Festival. Now in its seventh year, the free event features best-selling authors, illustrators, and poets celebrating the ... Read More

Open onto a room in L.A.'s Mondrian Hotel; the French art curator's white lego robot bumps about the legs of an Aegean-blue table while Hollis Henry, the female lead-singer of ... Read More

I may have mentioned BookMooch in the past, but it's worth revisiting. Book Mooch is an ingenious little site that facilitates book trading through the mail. It works like this ... Read More

The newest installment in Donna Andrews' Meg Lanslow mystery series, The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, wraps suspense, humor, and a screwball cast of characters into a mystery novel with ... Read More

In The Entitled, six-time National Sportswriter of the Year and NPR commentator Frank Deford takes the reader deep inside the game of baseball and evokes the roles of the players ... Read More

On Wednesday, September 12, Dave Eggers was awarded the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, a $250,000 prize recognizing his contribution in this category. Founder of the 826 Valencia children's writing ... Read More

As James Lee Burke's new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. The ... Read More

The Man Booker Prize shortlist was recently announced on September 6, 2007. Here are the finalists: Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape) The Reluctant Fundamentalist ... Read More

I've never paid any attention to Charles Bukowski's poetry until today, when a friend showed me this poem, "the man with the beautiful eyes," which simply blew me away and ... Read More

Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in ... Read More