Just in from Peg Michel

SAVE THE DATE FOR THE CHARLESTON LITERARY FESTIVAL NOVEMBER 4 – 13, 2022 SOUTH CAROLINA, USAWATCH ALL RECORDED CHARLESTON LITERARY FESTIVAL 2021 SESSIONS 22 sessions from Charleston Literary Festival 2021 are now available to watch online and they are free to view! WATCH NOWWhat does it take to write a Booker-nominated novel? Watch three of the four US nominees for the 2021 Booker Prize – Maggie Shipstead, Patricia Lockwood and Nathan Harris – in

Goodnight Moon

An article in The New Yorker, written by Anna Holmes and dated January 31, 2022, discussed Margaret Wise Brown, the author of a beloved children’s book Goodnight Moon. I read the article with great interest because, of course, I remember reading Goodnight Moon to my children and grandchildren. Many a child memorized the book and many a parent almost went to sleep themselves while reading

Special Podcast TONIGHT

Late notice about an important event for those interested in Marie Benedict, author of The Personal Librarian . Benedict will discuss her new book Her Hidden Genius, which tells the story of Rosalind Franklin, the British scientist who discovered the double helix DNA structure. Guess what? Two men took credit for her work in order to win the Nobel Prize!! To listen to the podcast,

Ashley’s Sack

During the 2021 Charleston Literary Festival, Kameelah Martin, Dean of the Graduate School at College of Charleston, interviewed Tiya Miles, whose book All That She Carried : The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2021. Yes, this book is non-fiction! Miles is a Professor of History at Harvard University, and she researched her own family

A Few Words about Wordle

Several weeks ago, friends suggested that I try the word game ‘Wordle.’ While I resisted for a while, I found that solving the puzzle each day was great fun. After all, everyone is doing it!! Perhaps you will be interested in the following insights to the game: 1. The founder –Josh Wardle came to the United States from Wales to earn an MFA from the

Words Matter

I know you have heard the phrase ‘words matter.’ And yes, indeed, they do. Words can harm or charm, encourage or outrage, inspire or deflate. OK, enought of that!! Some words are simply overused, misused or useless, and the folks at Lake Superior State University have, since 1976, vented about the most tiresome examples of such. Each year they publish a list for The Banished

Young Author Makes the News

Peg Michel sent me the following NYT article about a little boy with a big imagination and a clever marketing scheme. Read the below excerpt and follow up by viewing the February 3rd 6:30 NBC Nightly News story about– An 8-Year-Old Wrote a Book and Hid It on a Library Shelf. It’s a Hit. Dillon Helbig, a second-grader from Idaho, wrote an 81-page book about

Booksellers and bookstores

The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher Historical fiction at its most authentic!! The Paris Bookseller is about real-life American Sylvia Beach, who opened a bookstore in Paris in 1919. The name of the bookstore was Shakespeare and Company, and it soon became a mecca for expatriate writers from America. (Readers will remember The Paris Wife, a story about Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley, who