PowellsBooks.Blog

Today's Hits: oprah calls it quits. new moon rises. lost in february. and more.

• Au Revoir, Oprah: In news that's guaranteed to send publishers into convulsions of horror, Oprah Winfrey is announcing on today's episode that she is folding up her talk show.

  Wipe away those tears, Oprah fans: she's turning her attention toward an entire cable network.

  (more...)

Yesterday afternoon, I was in a severe anti-social mode. I wasn't surprised, as it typically happens for this work-at-home freelance writer after an action-packed trip away. Ever since I returned on Sunday, I've retreated further and further into my home office, not wanting to talk to anyone. The only time I did venture out into public this week, to the grocery store, I felt like throttling completely innocent strangers for doing nothing except having the nerve to be in my vicinity.

Times like these, I decided, called for renting the third season of Dexter. "I'm in the perfect Dexter mood, because I feel like throttling complete strangers!" I happily announced to the move-rental guy. We agreed that it's best to let Dexter (a serial killer) do said strangling, and were pondering whether he takes special requests via list form (I kid, I kid), when my phone blooped, telling me I had a text. I sighed, because I really didn't want to talk to anyone.

It was my buddy Josh. "Want to get a drink tonight?"

"Sure, what time?" I typed ...

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes

Reviewed by Benjamin Moser
Harper's Magazine

Richard Holmes's monumental The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon, $40) opens in 1769, when the dashing young millionaire Joseph Banks alighted on Tahiti, a paradisiacal isle that was to host Captain James Cook's observations of the transit of Venus -- though, as the crewmen discovered, the island's other charms lent the name of their temporary establishment, Fort Venus, more suggestive shades.

Banks is the figure that unites a whole panorama of Romantic heroes: as president of the Royal Society, he went on to sponsor all sorts of remarkable -- today largely forgotten -- -scientists, explorers, and writers. Rather than dwell on the overly familiar Victorians -- Stanley and Livingstone, Dickens and Darwin -- Holmes brings to life no less notable scientific and artistic geniuses. Whether he is describing Caroline and William Herschel, a brother-and-sister team of astronomers who discovered Uranus and who revolutionized our ...

Today's Hits: national book award winners. nabokov's last book. (and his old ones redesigned.) sex and the city goes back to school. and more.

Let the Book Awards Spin: Last night Colum McCann won the National Book Award for fiction with his novel Let the Great World Spin.

In accepting the award, the Irish-born Mr. McCann, now a teacher of creative writing at Hunter College, said, "As fiction writers and people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right."

The recent announcement of the word unfriend winning "word of the year" by the New Oxford American Dictionary (by the way, isn't it called de-friending?) made me think about some of the ways Facebook has changed my friendships for the better…

* I've found long-lost friends. I fully realize this is quite obvious, but stick with me. While reuniting with high school and college pals was the reason I joined the Facebook craze in the first place, what I didn't expect is for new friendships to blossom out of it. To wit: I've discovered that a couple of high-school acquaintances now live in Portland and I've met — and become buddies — with a couple of them in person, like Zach and Thane, neither of whom I knew well while growing up, and now I'm glad to have these two fascinating fellows in my life. And then there is Manny, whom I knew in college and NYC but always as more of a friend-of-a-friend. Through joking around with each other on Facebook, we've become better buddies than we ever were in person, which then translated into ...

[Editor's note: The following is a reprint of our 2005 interview with John Irving, whose new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, has just come out in hardcover. Click here to get signed editions while they last!]

On one list are the books you like to recommend. You want to turn someone on to your favorite unknown author or introduce them to the season's latest, greatest novel. If you've read widely enough over the years, you'll match reader to occasion. The list comes to include something for just about anyone in any setting:

Funny books and smart ones; easy and hard; books that teach and those that entertain; pages best turned at the beach, on a plane, or sick in bed; a pick for the woman you want to impress or the friend who reads mostly in ten-minute bursts between cab fares; dry, plotless affairs that ease you toward sleep or blazers that set your mind racing, keep you up late into the night...

A much shorter list contains the sure bets — the ones that work for just about any reader, young or old, anywhere, at any time. A Prayer for Owen Meany may be the only book on my second list.

You get OWEN MEANY'S SQUEAKY VOICE into a person's head and the worst they'll ever say is they loved it. Without fail, they will thank you. [See our guarantee.] Three people I've given it to, years and oceans apart, reported back that it had become their favorite novel of all-time.

"Which one do I read next?" they all ask, so swiftly converted. (Often they're not even done with the book and already they're planning ahead. Anxiety has set in, a debilitating abandonment neurosis symptomatic of the last hundred pages.) Tell them, "Take your pick." The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Widow for One Year...

This summer, John Irving will publish Until I Find You, possibly his most personal book to date. "Here it is my eleventh novel," he considers, "but I think this character, Jack Burns, is more fully developed than any character in any novel I've written."

÷ ÷ ÷

Dave: The Fourth Hand offered a much more abbreviated vision of its characters' lives than we typically see in your books. We don't meet Patrick and Doris until they're adults.

John Irving: The Fourth Hand was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing. It was a vision of a book, like a movie, that did not have the passage of time as a major or minor character. For that reason, it was more manageable, shorter.

If stunning photography and stylish book design rock your world, you probably already own a selection of Taschen publications. Taschen is bold, brassy, and very, very German.

In Istanbul, three thousand miles from Taschen's home turf, the house of Ertuğ and Kocabiyik has produced some of the most beautiful large format, limited edition photography books in the world.

Specializing in books on Byzantine and Ottoman art and architecture, the large format photography of Ahmet Ertuğ is nothing less than delectable.

It's almost silly to put my photos of his photos in this post; my camera is a Sony Sure Shot with 3.2 megapixels. Ertuğ shoots with an 8 x 10 inch, large format camera. His photos can be viewed online.

Currently, we have three of his books in stock. In Pursuit of Excellence: Worlds of Art from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts was published in 1993. His ode to the principal mosque in Istanbul, Hagia Sophia: A Vision of Empires, was published in 1997. ...

So now I've blabbed about how the P.S. book has brought contributors and their friends together (including my own reunions). Now what do I have up my sleeve, you wonder? For my third blog post, I wanted to address a question people often ask me about the book: Why letters? Why are they unsent? Okay, that's two questions (hey, people are nosy, what can I say?).

Before I begin, might we pause for a moment of silence to commemorate the lost art of letter writing? I mean, think about it... what's the last letter you wrote? With texts and tweets and tootz (what, you don't know what a tootz is? Okay, I made that up), the craft of putting pen to paper is dying. And might I say, I'm ever-so-glad that I'm not a "digital native," because I actually remember passing notes and scribbling W/B/S (write back soon, don't you know) and cramming ten-page missives into sticker-filled envelopes. I'm also thankful that I've kept all these letters, which are currently sitting happily in a big garbage bag in my storage closet. Maybe I'll ...

Today's Hits: the dictionary gets unfriendly. palin's rogue facts. from here to eternity too gay? a graphic demise for coffee table publisher. and more.

The Unfriendliest Year: The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected its Word of the Year — which seems a little unfair, as a truly awe-inspiring new word still has about a month and a half to seize the public's imagination in 2009.

Anyway, the word they chose might be hard to top: "unfriend."

When I tell people that I was in a sorority in college (which is admittedly pretty rare), they assume I'm the type of person who refers to 100 people as my "sisters."

Instead, I was the one who would fall asleep during initiation ceremonies, roll my eyes when we'd recite our little chants (or whatever you call them) at our weekly meetings, and would declare "uh, actually, I only have one sister" on a regular basis.

I proudly called myself the black sheep. "I joined a sorority so that I can talk from experience about what I hate," I'd tell others. "You know, kinda like visiting Texas."

Behind my laugh was something a little deeper, though. To explain, I have to walk you through the notoriously brutal sorority rush at Indiana University. The year was 1989. I was a small-town Ohio girl, 18 and naïve and totally in over my head. While other girls around me were preparing recommendation letters (!), buying special rush outfits that screamed "I have money" and scoring invites to sorority house lunches before rush, I figured I'd sail through unscathed. I didn't realize until ...