Notes: University Book Store Cooks; Hemingway's Relocates
Cool and tasty idea of the day. University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
co-sponsored a "Nigella Express" contest. More than 100 recipes were
submitted by contestants vying for the "chance to be first in line at
Nigella Lawson's Seattle appearance November 13, to win an array of
food-related swag and to have their recipes published in the P-I."
University
Book Store's Stesha Brandon "prepared recipes for nine finalists and
presented them at the Bargreen Ellingson test kitchen in Sodo for the
three judges." The P-I includes winning recipes in the
appetizer, entrée and dessert categories, all chosen because they "were
tasty as well as representative of 'express' food."
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The Toronto Star
featured a different sort of gastronomic update. For Canada's Giller
Prize festivities at the Four Seasons Hotel, the fare of tuna tartare
and beef tenderloin apparently did not please Margaret Atwood and her
husband, Graeme Gibson.
The Star reported that "two of
the most notable guests took a pass on that menu and instead brought
their own dinner in a box. . . . They were protesting the Four Seasons'
role in a massive resort development in Grenada that threatens an
endangered species: the Grenada dove."
According to Gibson,
"Until there is a fair resolution of the dispute over the kind of
resort being built in Grenada, we cannot accept food or drink from the
Four Seasons."
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Mina Hemingway's Florida Book Store, Naples, Fla., has relocated to larger space in a more family-oriented neighborhood. The Naples Daily News reported
that the bookstore, owned by the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway,
features 50,000 titles, 80% of which are used.
Hemingway said that customers sometimes ask her to autograph her grandfather's books, adding that The Old Man and the Sea is the most popular of them.
"We're
here to promote reading and the love of books," she said. "We're
selling a philosophy of books as a lifestyle and the recycling of
books, passing them along."
Hemingway and her husband, Jon Rothenberg, "also have a satellite store planned for Key West, as a partnership with a Yacht Clubs of the Americas gallery. The shop, which will include an art gallery, bookstore and coffeeshop, is set to open before Thanksgiving."
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Today's New York Times opens a profile of Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright by welcoming her to the intense world of the celebrity spotlight, as controversy continues to brew over an essay she for the London Review of Books.
The essay was about Madeleine McCann, the child who disappeared last spring in Portugal sparking international media attention, and "newspapers here and in Britain picked out a sentence in which Ms. Enright said that she 'disliked the McCanns earlier than most people' and ignored what she wrote afterward: that she was ashamed of the impulse and, in the end, rejected it."
Headline-grabbing controversy aside, however, the piece also offer a more subtle glimpse at the author's life and her award-winning novel, The Gathering.
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Former Waterstone's
employees Tim West and Simon Key have a name for their soon-to-open
bookstore in Wood Green, according to the Tottenham, Wood Green and Edmonton Journal.
The Big Green Bookshop is the winner, chosen by a panel of judges who
"whittled down more than 400 entries from Haringey school pupils." You
can follow the bookshop's march toward opening day at its blog.
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Overdue books returned after more than a century.
The BBC reported that Chile has sent 3,778 stolen books back to Peru's national library. In 1881, Chilean soldiers pillaged the library in Lima and made off with "the volumes--written in Greek, Latin, French and Spanish, many dating back to the 16th Century."
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Allen
W. Lindstrom has joined Barnes & Noble as v-p, corporate
controller. He was formerly chief financial officer of Liberty Travel
and before that was financial controller of the Museum Company and held
accounting positions at Toys R Us.
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HarperCollins has announced changes in the Internet Development Group:
- Leslie Hulse has been named v-p, digital business development. She will focus on crafting new partnerships with retailers, search engines and others to distribute the publisher's digital content widely for marketing and commerce. Hulse has worked at HarperCollins for 10 years in a variety of senior financial and management roles, supporting the growth of the company's online efforts.
- Rachel Chou has been named v-p, online product development and operations. She will be responsible for working with publishers and marketing staff to define business, user interface and design requirements and for crafting best practice consumer experiences on the publisher's websites. Chou joined HarperCollins in 2005 as a consultant to oversee the development of the www.harpercollinschildrens.com site.
Park, who has guided readers through Korea's history with novels such as her Newbery Medal-winning A Single Shard and When My Name Was Keoko, invites readers to try a Korean tradition with this book of 27 clever sijo poems. Aspiring young writers and those who work with them will likely embrace this new form (though it's actually quite old, dating back to the 6th century B.C.), with similarities to haiku. In her preface and in a more detailed backmatter section, the author explains that sijo, when translated into English, is composed of three lines, each with 14-16 syllables. The first line sets the topic, the second develops it and the third offers a twist. Unlike haiku, which largely confines itself to nature, sijo may explore a wide range of topics, including relationships and everyday moments. Park gives an ideal example of the quotidian transformed with her opening sijo, "Breakfast": "For this meal, people like what they like, the same every morning./ Toast and coffee. Bagel and juice. Cornflakes and milk in a white bowl./ Or--warm, soft, and delicious--a few extra minutes in bed." Others poems incorporate rhyme, such as "From the Window," which contrasts the "sparrows at the feeder each day, dull in brown and black and gray" with the brightly-hued "triple threat--a primary-colored display: cardinal, goldfinch, blue jay!" Because of the sijo form (with its surprise twist), the poems brim with humor and will have young people testing their wits as they try their hand at a few poems of their own. Banyai's pen-and-inks with splashes of color heighten the humor (as with "Tennis," in which he shows antics not often associated with on-court play). Park's backmatter also notes that sijo began as songs with musical accompaniment, often performed by women, spawning a "strong legacy of women poets." Whether fans of history, cultural study, wordplay or writing, readers will find much to mine in these pages (and if they stick with the endnotes, they'll find an extra surprise: an encore poem).--