The English Inquisitor

Episode 4 – Wordstock

Authors

• Shannon Wheeler works as a graphic artist, producing comics, graphic novels, and other ventures.
• Bonny Becker and Laura Kvasnosky share their passion for writing for children. Bonny has written “A Visitor for Bear” now on the New York Times Best Sellers List and Laura  has written many picture books including the Zelda and Ivey series.
• Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond are The Book Babes! They have a new book out, and radio show with WMNF 88.5 FM based out of Tampa, FL. You can listen to them online here!
• John Hodgman plays the PC in the Apple commercials. The man is seriously funny. Don’t discount him for his minor tv commercial fame. He’s an awesome writer.

Literary Events

• Leon County Books Groups
• Moonrise Book Group in Jacksonville
• Florida Writers Conference November 14th – 16th in Lake Mary
• Miami Book Fair November 9 -16

From AlanGratz.com: “Alan is the author of one of the ALA’s 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Samurai Shortstop (Dial 2006), and a 2008 ALA Quick Pick for Young Adult Readers, Something Rotten (Dial 2007). A sequel, Something Wicked (Dial 2008), is on shelves now. His first book for middle grade readers, The Brooklyn Nine (Dial 2009) debuts in March 2009, just in time for the baseball season.”

Riffing off of Hamlet, Something Rotten is a great read! “A stinking-rich family. A reeking paper plant. A murder most foul. Something is definitely rotten in Denmark, Tennessee, and only 17-year-old etective Horatio Wilkes can sniff out the killer.”

And you can read it for FREE! But only until November 30. Click here, here, here, or even here to read this great book!

Rudolfo Anaya is known as the father of Chicano literature. He has written several important books, including Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlan, and Tortuga. Anaya said “I’ve always used the technique of the cuento. I am an oral storyteller, but now I do it on the printed page. I think if we were very wise we would use that same tradition in video cassettes, in movies, and on radio.”

You can find out more about Anaya and read an interview with him on The Big Read.

From DouglasAdams.com, “Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge in March 1952, educated at Brentwood School, Essex and St John’s College, Cambridge where, in 1974 he gained a BA (and later an MA) in English literature.

He was creator of all the various manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. Since its first airing in March 1978 it has been transformed into a series of best-selling novels, a TV series, a record album, a computer game and several stage adaptations.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s phenomenal success sent the book straight to Number One in the UK Bestseller List and in 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. He won a further two (a rare feat), and was nominated – though not selected – for the first Best of Young British Novelists awards.

He followed this success with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992). … Other publications include Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988).

Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 of a sudden heart attack. He was 49. He had been living in Santa Barbara, California with his wife and daughter, and at the time of his death he was working on the screenplay for a feature film version of Hitchhiker.”

Find our more at DouglasAdams.com.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.” -Ch. 1

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929. Her novel Mrs. Dalloway was a reaction to WWI, and how European Society was trying to deal with the tragedy. Mrs. Dalloway was used as the basis for the novel The Hours, which was then adapted into acclaimed film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman.

Listen to an interview with Woolf from 1937 at the BBC

Find out more information about Virginia Woolf.

From History.com: On this day in 1978, Toni Morrison wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. The award brought the writer national attention for the first time, although she had already published two moderately successful books, The Bluest Eye (1969) and Sula (1973). Morrison went on to win the Pulitzer in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. For more information about Toni Morrison and her award, you can go to History.com.

From History.com “On this day, a federal judge rules that Ulysses by James Joyce is not obscene. The book had been banned immediately in both the United States and England when it came out in 1922. Three years earlier, its serialization in an American review had been cut short by the U.S. Post Office for the same reason. Fortunately, one of James’ supporters, Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, published the novel herself in 1922. Ulysses, with its radical stream-of-consciousness narrative, deeply influenced the development of the modern novel.”

 You can learn more about James Joyce from History.com.

Sherman J. Alexie, Jr., was born in October 1966. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, he grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA, about 50 miles northwest of Spokane, WA. From a review for his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: “Here, people treat each other (and life) with amused tolerance–although anger can easily erupt in this environment of endemic alcoholism and despair. The history of defeat is ever- present; every attempt to hold onto cultural tradition aches with poignancy: Thomas-Builds-the-Fire is the storyteller everyone mocks and no one listens to; Aunt Nezzy, who sews a traditional full- length beaded dress that turns out to be too heavy to wear, believes that the woman “who can carry the weight of this dress on her back…will save us all.” Meanwhile, young men dream of escape–going to college, being a basketball star–but failure seems preordained. These tales, though sad and at times plain- spokenly didactic, are often lyrically beautiful and almost always very funny. Chapters focus on and are narrated by several different characters, but voices and perspectives often become somewhat indistinguishable–confusing until you stop worrying about who is speaking and choose to listen to the voice of the book itself and enter into its particular sensibility. Irony, grim humor, and forgiveness help characters transcend pain, anger and loss while the same qualities make it possible to read Alexie’s fiction without succumbing to hopelessness. Forgiveness seems to be the last moral/ethical value left standing: the ability both to judge and to love gives the book its searing yet affectionate honesty.”

To find more about Alexie visit his website FallsApart.com.

 A Veteran’s Day Quote for you by Ernest Hemingway.

 Lots of famous authors have served their country in different capacities. Here is a short list of some of them:

World War I

Ernest Hemingway: Drove ambulances in Italy

Thomas E. Lawrence: (Lawrence of Arabia) Infantry Soldier

Wilfred Owen: Second Lieutenant with the Manchester Regiment

Siegfried Sassoon: Infantry Officer

E.E. Cummings: Ambulance driver

World War II

Kurt Vonnegut: Infantry Soldier, survived bombing of Dresden as POW

Norman Mailer: Served in the South Pacific (just passed away Saturday, Nov 9)

1st Gulf War

Anthony Swafford: US Marines (The movie Jarhead was based on his memoir.)

November 8, 1900

Margaret Mitchell is born

On this day in 1900, Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind(1936), is born in Atlanta, Georgia.

From The History Channel:

Mitchell worked as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal for six years. She quit after an ankle injury limited her mobility, and she devoted herself to her novel about the South during and after the Civil War. Her tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the shallow Southern belle transformed into ruthless survivor during the war, became the biggest American publishing sensation of its day. The book sold 1 million copies in its first six months in print, 8 million by the time Mitchell died in 1949, and at least 25 million more to date.