by Steven W. Beattie

Censoring Vargas Llosa

The 74-year-old Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa made a name for himself with a series of books published in Spain during the Franco regime in the 1960s. Books such as The City and the Dogs ... Read More »

November 29, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

Vonnegut, Jr. memorial library opens in Indianapolis

By Steven W. Beattie

When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died in 2007, American literature lost one of its most idiosyncratic and beloved voices. That voice is now being honoured with a new library in the author's hometown of Indianapolis. The ... Read More »

November 22, 2010 | Filed under: Book news, Libraries

Sylvia Plath inducted into American Poets’ Corner

By Steven W. Beattie

"This is the light of the mind / Cold and planetary." Those lines, from Sylvia Plath's poem "The Moon and the Yew Tree," testify to the heartbreaking isolation and loneliness the American poet seemed to ... Read More »

November 8, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

George W. Bush remains unrepentant in memoir

By Steven W. Beattie

Although the book does not land on store shelves until tomorrow, details have already started to leak out about Decision Points, George W. Bush's new memoir, largely as a result of media sources that received ... Read More »

November 8, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

Lady Chatterley celebrates 50th anniversary of her acquittal

By Steven W. Beattie

It will be 50 years ago tomorrow that a British court declared that D.H. Lawrence's previously banned novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, did not constitute obscenity. In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Ian Brown commemorates the anniversary ... Read More »

November 1, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

Two views of Arundhati Roy

By Steven W. Beattie

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize“winning author of The God of Small Things, has been in the news recently for her outspoken comments about Kashmiri secession from India. Last week, rumours began circulating that the author ... Read More »

November 1, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

A day in the life of Ifran Sanci: on trial for obscenity, honoured by International Publishers Association

By Steven W. Beattie

Each year at Harbourfront's International Festival of Authors, the literary festival currently underway (until Saturday) in Toronto, PEN Canada sponsors an empty chair to bring attention to writers around the world who have been imprisoned ... Read More »

October 25, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

Tony Burgess’s bloody new book trailer

By Steven W. Beattie

Book trailers are becoming more pervasive and sophisticated all the time; they're also becoming more effective as tools for selling books. (HarperCollins's creepy trailer for Emma Donoghue's Room was a hit on the Internet even ... Read More »

October 25, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

Rushdie, Amis, and others protest closing of U.K. centre memorializing D.H. Lawrence

By Steven W. Beattie

A group of volunteers is currently working to save iconic Canadian poet Al Purdy's A-frame cottage, with the intention of turning it into a home for a writer-in-residence program. In a similar vein, well-known figures ... Read More »

October 18, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

The return of Harry Potter. Maybe.

By Steven W. Beattie

In news that is likely to send shivers of anticipation up the spines of publishers worldwide, J.K. Rowling has told Oprah Winfrey she would consider another instalment of her mega-selling Harry Potter series. The Sydney ... Read More »

October 4, 2010 | Filed under: Book news

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