In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great invaded and occupied at tremendous cost the land of Bactria. This region (now northern Afghanistan, southern Tajikistan and southeastern Uzbekistan) soon became the most truculent in Alexander's empire, and after his death a civil war erupted among the Greeks settled there. Rival factions promoted rival kings who created rival secessionist states. The Greeks in Bactria fought one another mercilessly from one generation to the next, until (in the words of one ancient source) they bled themselves dry. Finally, in 145 B.C. a swarm of nomadic
Since my grandfather's personal papers and manuscripts became available to the public in 1979 through the Hemingway Room at the Kennedy Library in Boston, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text of A Moveable Feast before publication. The new Restored Edition published in 2009 commemorates the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's completion of the first draft of the manuscript. It seeks to restore the original text that my grandfather wrote and make it available to a wider audience.
Significant changes were made to the text of A Moveable Feast after my grandfather's death in 1961 for the posthumous edition first published in 1964. The order of the chapters was changed. The author's preface was fabricated. The last chapter was moved and reworked by the editors to include material that the author had considered for an ending but decided against using. The title had also not been decided on by Hemingway and was chosen by his widow, Mary Hemingway. To see all of the changes in the Restored Edition, you would really need to read it side ...
Thich Nhat Hanh is a favorite at Powell's. His many books, including the epochal Being Peace and Peace Is Every Step, fly off the shelves. Anyone interested in Buddhism, and many who are already experienced explorers of the path, eventually find their way to his work. Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master and social activist, has, in his way, changed the world. He's brought the concept of mindfulness, of being totally aware and awake in each and every moment which we experience, to a mass audience. The example of his own life is almost as powerful as his words: he was an early peace activist
Author Julian Rubinstein will soon have a new essay about the tenth anniversary for Powells.com. In the meantime, here is the original essay he wrote for us — and a video of Rubinstein speaking to Ambrus from his prison in Satoraljaujhely, Hungary during a visit with award-winning documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport:
And over on The Rumpus, Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent, writes about Rubinstein and Ambrus. (While I'm at it, don't miss Anthony's reading at Powell's Books on Hawthorne on Thursday, July 23, at 7:30pm.)
[T]hink of how hampered the first two Harry Potter films were by their constant desire to cram every fun bit from the books into the films. Now imagine them as 10-episode TV seasons, and you begin to get an idea of why so many networks are pursuing the idea of adapting novels as TV series.
The piece looks at some upcoming book-to-TV projects — and some that might really surprise you.
A Song of Ice and Fire (HBO, ordered to pilot): Based on George R.R. Martin's lengthy, long-delayed epic fantasy series (planned to sprawl over seven books), Song is the potential series that has most excited both book and TV fans, if Internet buzz is any indication. Martin's series, indeed, seems like a good fit for HBO (the network initially described it as "The Sopranos in Middle-Earth"), and the author, a former TV writer, will be intimately involved in turning the novels into a series. Each book will equal one season of the show, and the first announced bit of casting (Peter Dinklage as Tyrion) seems almost too good to be true. The books are dense but not so dense that their events can't easily be conveyed in a 12 episode TV season, and the plots are intriguing with well-drawn characters. That said, the big question here is going to be expense. Once the series leaves the rather intimate first novel behind, will it have the ratings to justify the money needed to build the worlds of the later novels? Chances of succeeding: Solid
Carter Beats the Devil (AMC, in development): If there's any series I desperately want to succeed on this list, it's this one. I dearly love Glen David Gold's novel, and early 20th century America seems like a potent world to build a TV series in. But if there's any series I'm less convinced will work as a series on this list, it's also this one. Carter is a good, good novel, but there's not quite enough there to sustain much more than one season of television, unless you expand an already expansive novel to a point where it will burst. Carter works because its entire structure works like one of the magic tricks its protagonist performs, distracting readers from what's going on but always keeping everything tied together in the end. A series, which would have to expand the story necessarily, would lose much of that quality. This would be better off as a miniseries or movie. Chances of succeeding: Low
Now I'm just waiting for the next new trend — turning hit TV shows into bestselling novels. Yes, I'm thinking about a magical YA romance between a cat-eating alien hand puppet and a small robot housekeeper that looks like a little girl...
Doyle Does Hollywood: Among the slate of new films opening this weekend is I Love You, Beth Cooper, a teen romantic comedy that was adapted from the novel by Larry Doyle, who guest-blogged for Powell's back in 2007 (read his hilarious entries here).
Sadly, the movie doesn't appear to live up to Doyle's book, as it scored a 34 on Metacritic. But some critics had nice things to say:
"The story is timeless; this could have taken place when Doyle graduated in '76 — or any year, really, since the effects of high school linger throughout adult life and nerds are forever." — Entertainment Weekly
"Isn't especially hilarious, but it has a warm sense of humor instead of a string of gross-out jokes. It'll be a cable mainstay." — New York Post
"Of the two co-stars, what I can say is that I'm looking forward to their next films." — Roger Ebert
Hmm, that's about it for the accolades. Well, at least we can still read Doyle's very warm and funny book.
We know, we know. You got super-busy yesterday and couldn't keep up with all the goings-on at our blog, and now you aren't sure where to start. (Or maybe you're an East Coaster and all of our posts went up after you punched out for the day.)
We've got your back. Here's what you missed yesterday on the blog:
Wild Feminine Wild Feminine author Tami Lynn Kent writes about learning to listen and follow the female body.
Book News for Thursday, July 9, 2009
Why authors should hesitate before lashing out at critics on the Interwebs, the cover of Dan Brown's new novel, and more!
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Washington Post Book World
For nearly a century the received wisdom in political Washington has been drawn from the famous speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," he said. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of his achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
Wild Feminine is the collective voice that arose from listening to the pelvic bowl. For the past 10 years, I've been working with the root of the female body. As a women's health physical therapist, I assist women in restoring physical and energetic balance to the pelvic bowl. Initially, my approach was "to fix" the symptoms of the body, but my results were significantly more effective when I learned to listen and to follow the body.
By attending to the root, I discovered an abundance of healing wisdom and creative resources, what I call "root medicine," for each woman to live her best and most vibrant life. The words that I chose to describe the essence of the female body, words like "pelvic bowl," "root," and "wild feminine landscape" are intentionally based in nature to express the beauty and rich textures of the female form. This poetic body is the one to come home to.
Right now, our pelvic bowls are crying out for our attention. They need us and we need them. We need to be present in our ...
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Bad Reviews and Pissed-Off Authors: I have no good excuse for why the whole Alain de Botton affair passed under my radar. Until Miss Gretchen sent a helpful email, I really had no idea any of this was happening. (Thank you, Miss Gretchen!!)
For those who are also not-in-the-know, the New York Times' ArtsBeat blog helpfully synopsizes yet another incident that demonstrates the danger of being a hot-tempered author who's a little too quick to click the "submit" button:
Alain de Botton...post[ed] a harsh comment on the blog of Caleb Crain, who had reviewed Mr. de Botton's latest work, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," for The New York Times Book Review. Mr. de Botton didn't like the review, and fired back: "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move [sic] you make."
It would seem the root of this problem is, de Botton doesn't actually understand how this thing called an "internet" works. From the ...
There are any number of settings where we might imagine Isaac Newton holding forth in February of 1699 -- under his famed apple tree, say, or before an august assembly of the Royal Society. Draining drams with counterfeiters in a lowlife London pub called the Dogg, though, seems less likely. But that's just what Britain's greatest scientist was doing -- and in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist, Thomas Levenson has done an admirable job of explaining how that odd scene came about. Although Newton's fame comes from physics, Levenson
As I got into the thick of writing Two Years, No Rain, I had one of those pleasant instances where a character I'd never planned for just popped up in the narrative and stuck around. He was a professor from Hong Kong and also a poet; one of the ongoing bits that developed in the story was one of his poems being translated by another character. So I sort of immersed myself in Chinese poetry for a while, spending a lot of time with Sam Hamill's incredible book of translated poems, Crossing the Yellow River. (It's amazing how many of these poems explore the pleasures of being drunk on wine. A good friend and I played a drinking game one night by opening the book to a random page; if the poem mentioned getting loaded, we took a drink. If it mentioned buying wine on credit, we chugged). So, anyway, this is a generalization, but in the old tradition of Chinese poetry, the poet himself is central to the composition, rather than some other person or object (again, being very general here), as in ...
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Posted by Review-a-Day, July 12th, 2009
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