Category — News

The winner of the Margaret Stilwell Prize, given each year to one of Providence’s young book collectors, is being announced right now at the Athenaeum.  I’m reeeeeeeally sorry I’m so far behind with the posting. (There’s also an organizational meeting for a new Friends of Washington Park Library that started fifteen minutes ago.  Which, again, sorry.)

There’s been a lot of action going on with the library; it seems as though the PPL may be ready to cede the city’s nine branches to the non-profit Providence Community Library, though the city’s not saying for sure yet which one it’s going to give the money to.  There have been lots of press releases floating around, but still no decision from the city.

In branch news, the brand-new Friends of the South Providence Library have a new blog, with a list of stuff they’d like donated.

And in other local book news:

The New Plays Festival started at Brown last night and runs through Sunday.

There’s a Publicly Complex reading at Ada this Saturday: Deborah Poe, Jon Woodward and Dobby Gibson.

There Will Still Be Light: A Freedom To Write Literary Festival hits Brown next week, with the literature of Burma being celebrated.  There’s a Burmese film festival happening (although it’s at four in the afternoon, for some reason.)  Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Amitow Ghosh will all be reading during the week, too.  The whole schedule’s here.

And a week from Saturday there’s a book/bake sale to benefit the Friends of the Smith Hill Library.

I had to read Octavia Butler’s Kindred in college and really, really hated almost every minute of it.  Not because of the somber story, in which a woman is mysteriously transported from 1976 Los Angeles to nineteenth-century Maryland, but because I find Butler’s prose style tedious and very annoying.  (Many, many people disagree with me, though.  Kindred is by far her most famous novel, and there are currently a quarter million copies of the book currently in print.)

Beacon Press, the Boston publisher, is looking to do a graphic novel adaptation of the book; if you’re an artist and you’re interested, email Allison Trzop, Beacon’s Graphic Books editor, at atrzop * at * beacon.org.

[via Bitch]

I’m going to be positive, and say that the eleven-person turnout for Joe The Plumber’s Wednesday book signing at a Washington Borders is due to lack of interest in McCain-style politics, and not a sign that the publishing industry as a whole is imploding.  Although I guess there’s that, too.