Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Richard Ford

Richard Ford’s Independence Day (1995) has the distinction of being the only book to have won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was the sequel to The Sportswriter and features the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Mr. Ford earned his MFA only after a detour through law school. "Frankly, I think deciding to try to be a writer was something I did purely on instinct and whimsy," he says. "It may have been...my first important independent act." He is the author of five novels and three books of short stories. His most recent novel, the third following the life of Frank Bascombe, The Lay of the Land, was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up across the border in San Diego. He writes about politics and corruption, religion and spirituality, love and heartbreak, and the clash of cultures in his 12 books of fiction, nonfiction, short stories, essays, and poetry. His prose brims with detail of personal experience in the borderlands. The Devil's Highway, his nonfiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), is an epic novel based on 19th century saint, peasant, and revolutionary, Teresa Urrea, a distant relative of the author and revered as the "Mexican Joan of Arc."

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Marjane Satrapi

Born on the edge of the Caspian Sea and educated in Tehran, Vienna, and Strasburg, Marjane Satrapi lives in Paris, where she is one of France's "new wave" comic book artists. Her acclaimed Persepolis and Persepolis 2 tell the story of a young girl trying to understand the difficult world around her. The books are based on Ms. Satrapi's youth in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq. Most recently, she has completed an animated film adaptation of the two-volume graphic novel, to be released in 2008. "You've never seen anything like Persepolis," Gloria Steinem says, "the intimacy of a memoir, the irresistibility of a comic book, and the political depth of the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy." Ms. Satrapi's illustrations appear regularly in French newspapers and magazines.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Mary Oliver

"Poetry isn’t a profession; it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that," says Mary Oliver. Her first volume, No Voyage, was published in 1963. Her third book, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize, and her New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award. Mary Oliver is among our very finest poets. Her work, celebrated for its precise imagery and evocation, conveys a deep connection with the natural world. Her poems are "...an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization, for too much flurry and inattention. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making" (Harvard Review).