Neil Gaiman On the Value of Scary Stories

Newbery Medal winner Neil Gaiman sat with TOON Books publisher Françoise Mouly and Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman to discuss his new graphic novel, Hansel and Gretel. The video embedded above features the entire conversation.

Gaiman confesses that the “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale really frightens him, but he does believe that children must be exposed to dark stories. Gaiman thinks that “if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up. I think it is really important to show dark things to kids—and in the showing, to also show that dark things can be beaten, that you have power.”

To watch the video go to here.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook Keeps Nook Family Up to Date

Posted October 15, 2014 by Justin Noszek  for the Overdrive Blog.

I’m sitting here at my desk, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab® 4 Nook® is dropped into my lap. I cast my mind back to recent history and remember that Barnes & Noble left the tablet game, looking to find another way to have Nook tablets distributed. Enter Samsung, and the new Galaxy Nook.

To break it down simply, it appears that Barnes & Noble approached Samsung, who repurposed the Galaxy Tab 4 – the Galaxy Tab closest in scale to the average book – and gave us the future of the Nook tablet. At the heart of the device, it’s still an Android tablet – running the most current version of the operating system. I’m not going to spend any time going over the specs with you, because you can see them for yourself here. What I want to talk about is how Samsung has improved upon the idea of the Nook Tablet.

(To read more click here)

(for an outside review click here)

Literary Tourism: New Bedford, MA

BY NICOLE PERRIN   OCT 19, 2014   for BookRiot.com  

New Bedford, MA, you say? Where’s that? Well if you’ve read half as much about the New England whaling industry as I have, you’d know. While Ishmael may leave Manhattan Island in “Loomings,” Moby-Dick‘s narrator is heading for Massachusetts—and while he hopes to go to Nantucket, he ends up stuck in New Bedford for a weekend, and ultimately ends up sailing from there. But there’s no reason to be as depressed as Ishmael is to have missed the packet to Nantucket, because New Bedford is an awesome literary place in its own right.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum

Not only does the New Bedford Whaling Museum feature enough art and artifacts to teach the uninitiated what a try-works is or how whaling changed both before and after Melville’s time, but it also has some especially interesting tidbits of New England history you might not be familiar with. If you’re wondering why the New Bedford area has so many Portuguese-style food options, you may find your answer in an exhibit on how the Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Brazilian communities developed very early in this location due to whaling.

You can also visit the last remaining wooden whaling ship, the Charles W. Morgan.

(Read the Rest)

NYPL Celebrates Ntozake Shange Play With a Schomburg Center Exhibit

The New York Public Library is hosting the “i found god in myself” exhibit in honor of Ntozake Shange’s play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. This exhibit was organized to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the piece’s premiere performance.

It opened on September 19, 2014 and will run until January 03, 2015. Patrons will be able to find it at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shange herself (pictured, via) will give a talk at the Schomburg Center on October 15, 2014.

Here’s more about the exhibition: “Turning to the choreopoem not simply as an engaging work of text or drama but as a well of social, political and deeply personal issues affecting the lives of women of color, the exhibition will feature 20 specially commissioned pieces in honor of each individual poem, additional non-commissioned artworks on display at satellite locations that address the work’s themes and archival material donated by Shange. The exhibition’s title is drawn from one of the last lines recited in the finale poem a laying on of hands.”

Book by Novel Prize in Economics Winner Jean Tirole

Balancing the banks : global lessons from the financial crisis by 

Mathias Dewatripont, Jean-Charles Rochet, and Jean Tirole ; translated by Keith Tribe

This compact (only 130 pages) but powerful book by three internationally recognized European economists is well worth reading (Dewatripont and Tirole also authored the fundamental The Prudential Regulation of Banks, 1994). The authors offer a thoughtful review of the current global financial crisis and a number of considered recommendations for ameliorating the next and inevitable one. Tirole's chapter 2, "Lessons from the Crisis," which encompasses almost half the book, is especially informative. The last chapter considers ways to deal with distressed banks. Readers will benefit most if they are familiar with modern financial institutions and instruments. --Choice

Get the Book

Patrick Modiano Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

French author Patrick Modiano has won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, it was revealed Thursday. In its announcement of the prize, the Swedish Academy heralded 69-year old Modiano for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation."   Modiano made his debut in 1968, with La place de l’étoile(Gallimard). His major works translated to English include three books from David R. Godine Publishers—Missing Person, Honeymoon, and Catherine Certitude—and Out of the Dark from University of Nebraska Press. A collection of three Modiano novellas, Suspended Sentences, which was slated to be published by Yale University Press in February 2015, but will now be released this November, according to a spokesperson there.

Godine is already experiencing a bump in sales, publicist Megan Sullivan told PW. The press has some stock for all three titles, but will work with Ingram's Lightning Source to replenish as early as next week. This is the second Nobel prize-winner on the Godine list. The Boston-based press also publishes the 2008 winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio.

Modiano, the 11th literature laureate born in France, according to the Academy, beat out favorites Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Haruki Murakami, and Svetlana Aleksijevitj for the prestigious prize. The award, honoring a body of work, comes with a $1.1 million purse.

Canadian short story writer Alice Munro won the prize in 2013, when she was praised by the Academy as a "master of the contemporary short story."

Note from Library: This one took us by surprise and we have put books by Modiano on order.

New Trailer Unleashed For ‘American Sniper’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MItGoIxoVGk

Warner Brothers has unveiled the official trailer for American Sniper. The video embedded above offers glimpses of lead actor Bradley Cooper as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle.

The screenplay is based on Kyle’s memoir. According to Deadline, the story “follows Kyle’s journey from rodeo cowboy to SEAL Chief with the highest number of sniper kills in U.S. military history.”

Three Million First Printing for Riordan's Finale

Disney Publishing Worldwide announced a three million copy first print run for The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan, the fifth and final installment in the author's Heroes of Olympus series.

The Blood of Olympus will be released in print and digital from Disney Publishing’s Disney-Hyperion imprint, and as an audiobook through Listening Library, on October 7. More than 40 million books are currently in print in the U.S. across Riordan’s three series from Disney-Hyperion: Percy Jackson & the Olympians, The Kane Chronicles, and The Heroes of Olympus.