Author James Crumley Dead

James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. Crumley described himself as a "bastard child of Raymond Chandler." Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch To tell his two detectives apart, Crumley suggested remembering that "Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot." The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel The Last Good Kiss, which many consider his best work, is considered classic:"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." Crumley made his literary debut in 1969 with a widely praised book, One to Count Cadence, his only nondetective novel. The novel tells the story of a group of American soldiers in the Philippines at the start of the Vietnam era.

Oprah's Latest Book Club Pick

Oprah's latest book club pick is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Oprah thinks "this book is right up there with the greatest American novels ever written." A review from O: The Oprah Magazine states: "Wroblewski's plot is dynamic--page by page compelling--and classical, evoking Hamlet, Antigone, Electra, and Orestes, as Edgar tries to avenge his father's death and his paternal uncle's new place in the affections of his mother. The scope of this book, its psychological insight and lyrical mastery, make it one of the best novels of the year." David Wroblewski grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest, where ''The Story of Edgar Sawtelle'' is set. In an interview with Jenny Stark which appeared in ''New West'', Wroblewski described his novel " I think this novel is as a story haunted by another story—two stories in fact. The other being the Mowgli stories from Kipling. I certainly don’t consider Edgar a “retelling” of Hamlet — that implies a degree of adherence to plot structure and dramatis personae that I continually tried to subvert. I understood that the Sawtelle dogs were Edgar’s Denmark. I also knew that I wanted to draw on some of Shakespeare’s other plays, snatching bits like the witches in ''MacBeth'', or the blindness in ''Lear''. In almost all other ways, however, I let the story wander without any requirement to ever coincide with ''Hamlet'', and in fact mostly it doesn’t. The imperative was for Edgar’s present story to be compelling, everything else was a distant second....Curiously, no one ever asks about the connection to Kipling’s ''The Jungle Book'', even though it is explicitly referenced in the text. (Hamlet never is—with the single exception of the phrase “Remember me.”) If we could ask Edgar what story most closely parallels his life, he’d point to Mowgli in an instant. '' The Story of Edgar Sawtelle '' is Wroblewski's first novel.

Upcoming Movies Inspired by Books

Blindness, based on the book Blindness by Nobel prize winning Jose Saramaago. Cast includes Julianne Moore and Danny Glover. Director: Fernando Meirelles. Rated R with a release date of September 26th.
Choke, based on the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. In 1999, Palahniuk's novel The Fight Club was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. The cast of Choke includes Anjelica Huston and Joel Grey. Director: Clark Gregg. Rated R with a release date of September 26.
Miracle at St. Anna based on the book Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride. McBride also wrote a well-loved memoir The Color of Water, a tribute to his Mother. The cast includes Derek Luke and Michael Ealy. Director: Academy Award nominated Spike Lee. Rated R with a release date of September 26.
Nights in Rodanthe, based on the book Nights in Rodanthe by best selling author Nicholas Sparks. Other Sparks' books have been made into movies: Message in a Bottle (1999), A Walk to Remember (2002), and The Notebook (2004). The cast of Nights in Rodanthe includes: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, and Christopher Meloni. Director: George C. Wolfe. Rated PG-13 with a release date of September 26.

New Agatha Christie Tapes Discovered

Dame Agatha Christie, noted mystery author, dictated numerous tapes on a Grundig Memorette machine in the mid-1960s to help write her autobiography. Matthew Prichard, Christie's grandson, found the tapes in a cardboard box at her Devon house. Before he could play them, he had to fix the machine on which the tapes were recorded. Christie can be heard musing about Miss Marple, one of her well-loved detectives: "I have now no recollection at all of writing Murder in the Vicarage. I don’t even remember why it was that I selected a new character, Miss Marple, to act as a sleuth in the case. Certainly, at the time I had no intension of continuing her for the rest of my natural life. I didn’t know then that she would become a rival to Hercule Poirot." Only one or two recordings of her voice were previously known to exist. Christie wrote 80 mysteries, most featuring either Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. An estimated 4 billion of her novels have been sold. Her play, The Mousetrap,holds the record for the longest opening run in the world. It began at the Ambassadors Theatre in London in November 1952. After 23,000 performances, Mousetrap is still on in the West End.
The Fremont Public Library has most of her novels available for checkout. Also available are Poirot's famous cases, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Evil Under the Sun in DVD format. Miss Marple's cases 4:50 from Paddington, The Mirror Cracked, Caribbean Mystery, and Sleeping Murder also are available for checkout. Marple's cases are either in DVD or VHS format. Agatha Christie was born 118 years ago on September 15.

Poet Louise Glück Winner of 2008 Wallace Stevens Award

Louise Glück has won the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and recognizes "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry." Academy Chancellor Robert Pinsky said that Glück "sometimes uses language so plain it can almost seem like someone is speaking to you spontaneously--but it's always intensely distinguished . . . There's always a surprise in Louise's writing; in every turn, every sentence, every line, something goes somewhere a little different, or very different, from where you thought it would." Glück, a Pulitzer Prize Winner, has published several collections of poetry, including: Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, The Triumph of Achilles, Ararat, The Wild Iris, Meadowlands, The First Five Books of Poems, Vita Nova, The Seven Ages, and Averno. Glück also has written a book of essays, Proofs and Theories. In the fall of 2003, she replaced Billy Collins as the Library of Congress's twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Currently, Glück is a writer in residence at Yale University.

2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Awarded to Maxine Hong Kingston

The National Book Foundation is awarding its 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Maxine Hong Kingston for her "outstanding achievements as a writer of fiction, memoir, and nonfiction." Kingston's works are: The Woman Warrior, China Men, The Fifth Book of Peace, and Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. The Foundation is also honoring Barney Rosset, head of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the Foundation, said, "This year's distinguished honorees broke new ground in American literary publishing. Kingston exposed the great story of American immigration to a new, rich blend of fiction, memory, folk-tale and political idea. Rosset opened a door to brash concepts about reading in America, letting controversial literary work speak for itself."
Scott Turow will announce the 2008 National Book Award finalists on October 15 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Turow, a Chicago attorney, has written: One L, Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, The Laws of Our Fathers, Personal Injuries, Reversible Errors, Ordinary Heroes, and Ultimate Punishment. A partner in the national firm of Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, he has given much time to pro bono cases. He has been appointed to a number of public bodies. Currently, Turow is a member of the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission.

2008 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The shortlisted titles for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, which "promotes the finest in fiction," are:
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga;
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry;
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh;
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant;
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher;
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
This year the judges are Michael Portillo, former MP and cabinet minister; Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar's bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster. In a statement, Portillo, the jury chair, called the shortlisted novels "intensely readable, each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative. These fine page-turning stories nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas and issues. These books are in every case both ambitious and approachable." Two of the titles--A Fraction of the Whole and The White Tiger--are first novels. This year some of the talk about the finalists focused on the omission of several major titles, particularly Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. The Guardian quoted Portillo as saying, "In the opinion of [the judges] taken together, Salman Rushdie's was not one of the top six books for us. We didn't have a huge debate about it." The winning title will be chosen and announced Tuesday, October 14.

Stephanie Meyer's Midnight Sun "On Hold"

Stephanie Meyer's latest book Midnight Sun has been put on hold "indefinitely." A rough draft had been leaked and appeared online. Meyer posted a message about the leak on her Web site: "I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being. As the author of the Twilight Saga, I control the copyright and it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide when the books should be made public."
Midnight Sun will tell the story of Twilight, the first book in Meyer’s series, from the perspective of Edward, a vampire and love interest of heroine Bella. Meyer wrote that she would prefer her fans not read the unfinished draft, but she has posted the entire leaked draft on her site. Currently no decisions have been made regarding the publication of Midnight Sun.
A film adaptation of Twilight arrives in theaters November 21.