Celebrate Black History Month

February 18th, 2012

February is Black History Month in the US. Take this opportunity to explore the civil rights movement and black history with your kids using some great reads from the Children’s Library. We have a wide selection of age appropriate materials about American heroes and iconic figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, among others. Below are a few recommended titles from our collection:

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Back of the Bus
Written by Aaron Reynolds, Illustrated by Floyd Cooper
Reviewed by Children’s Library Volunteer Kristen Crans

Back of the Bus draws you right through the open doors of a public bus bumping down the roads of Montgomery Alabama in 1955. It takes you to the back seat of that bus, where a little boy and his mother are on their way home after a long, tiring day. The boy and his Mama are sitting in the back because that’s where folks of their color are supposed to be sitting. But on this particular day, one woman chooses not to sit where she is supposed to, and that woman is Mrs. Rosa Parks.

This retelling of the story of Rosa Parks is enlightening and very relatable to childrenas it is told through the eyes of a young boy experiencing it all first hand. If the rhythm of the text isn’t enough to draw the reader in, then the oil paintings will, as they highlight the faces and emotions felt by all riding on that bus that day. This is a great
conversation starter to discuss what can otherwise be a difficult topic for children to understand. This moving story can be found in the Children’s Library with the Easiest Reader Picture Books  under the call number ER.

Giant Steps to Change the World

by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee

Reviewed by Children’s Library Volunteer Carole Black

The concepts presented in Giant Steps to Change the World make it more appropriate for 7-10 year olds and may be read individually or in a group to initiate discussion.

Sean Qualls's bold graphics, collage and drawings colorfully illustrate the achievements of people who take risks to realize their dreams.  Creative text encourages the reader to face fears and obstacles they encounter as they take their big first step to making their own impact on the world.

New @ the Library. You can find it in the Children's Library with the Easiest Readers in EL.

Some other titles you might like:

boycottBoycott Blues : How Rosa Parks Inspired a Nation, written by Andrea Davis Pinkney ; illustrations by Brian Pinkney.

Illustrations and lyrical text recall the December, 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and the events that followed.

Found with in the Children's Library on the Holiday Shelf under EP

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I Have a Dream, by Martin Luther King Jr., with forward by Coretta Scott King; Illustrated by fifteen Coretta Scott King Award and Honor book artists.

I Have a Dream is the complete text from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous speech for the MArch on Washington. It includes paintings by fifteen award winning illustrators.

You can find it in the Children's Library with the Juvenile Non-Fiction under J 325.26 KING.

One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams Garcia

OCSOne Crazy Summer is the story of three sisters from Brooklyn who are sent to Oakland, CA in the summer of 1968 to meet the mother who left them, and who happens to be active in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. A  story of self discovery that also touches on topics of racism, abandonment and cultural identity, this book comes highly recommended by the Library's own Bookworms!For middle grade readers, ages 9+.
You can find it with the Juvenile Fiction under J WIL.


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On Perfume, Paris and Glamour

February 13th, 2012

Photo: Vincent Thibert

Photo: Vincent Thibert

Denyse Beaulieu is an author and translator based in Paris. She writes a bilingual blog on scent. Her book The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent, will be published on March 15th by Harper Collins. She has learned the principles of perfume composition with the help of some of the profession’s most prestigious noses. Her expertise has been acknowledged by the London College of Fashion where she has taught an intensive “Understanding Fragrance” course. She is a member of the Société Française des Parfumeurs and a juror at the Fragrance Foundation France.

We are thrilled that Denyse will be a part of our Passion Panel on Wednesday 15 February at 19h30. She will join experts Sister Noella Marcellino and  Robert Camuto for this panel on three things we love and associate with France: perfume, cheese, and wine. Today, Denyse explains how she was introduced to perfume and how one of her memories was transformed into an essence. She writes:

“I want more Denyse!”

There was no comma between “more” and “Denyse”. The wonderful Jenny Heller, my editor at HarperCollins, didn’t just want more out of my manuscript. She wanted more about me and my “glamorous Parisian life”. This wasn’t just about perfume, she said: it was a woman’s story.

I was dismayed. Granted, The Perfume Lover: a Personal History of Scent was written in the first person. Wasn’t I living every perfume lover’s dream? I’d inspired a great perfumer to compose a fragrance based on a story I’d told him. I would be chronicling its development throughout our work sessions, and my journal would be the narrative thread stringing together my essays on the art of perfumery. Still, however partial and subjective my “personal history of scent” would be, I hadn’t expected Jenny to ask me to delve into my life and loves. But she had a point: how could I tease my life in Paris apart from my passion for fragrance?

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. And thus, perfumery, like love, requires technical skills and some knowledge of black magic; both can be arts, though neither is recognized as such. And I’ve been studying both in the capital of love and luxury, Paris, where I settled half a lifetime ago. It is in Paris that I learned about l’amour; in Paris that I stepped through the looking glass into the invisible realm of scent. I’ve had good teachers: discussing the delights of the flesh as passionately and learnedly as you would speak about art or literature is one of the favourite pastimes of my adopted countrymen. For the French, pleasure is intensified by delving into its nuances. By putting words to it. La volupté is taken very seriously indeed: a worthy subject for philosophizing in the boudoir.  Is this why fine perfumery, with its delicate balance of artistic creativity, exquisite taste, sensuous pleasure and technical know-how, is such a quintessentially French achievement?

It was, in fact, because of the Philosophie dans le Boudoir that I left Montreal for Paris: I was doing my PhD on the Marquis de Sade. But it was only while writing The Perfume Lover – and adding “more Denyse” – that I realised my first lessons in philosophy had indeed been dispensed to me in a boudoir. Or rather, between the closet, dresser and Vogue collection of a glamorous French neighbour in the suburbs of Montreal. It was thanks to her that the first drops of French perfume ever touched my skin. Perhaps they acted as a magic potion. That day, at age eleven, I decided I’d be French. Not only French, but Parisian. And not only Parisian, but Left Bank Parisian: glamorous, intellectual and bohemian.

The perfume was Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Was it by chance that the very first perfumer I met, decades later, was one of its co-creators? My encounter with Jacques Polge, who had since gone on to become Chanel’s in-house perfumer, was my first step into an intensely secret world that would open itself up to me as I learned to translate its coded language into words.  But I never thought that one day my words would be translated back into scent and poured inside a bottle. That Paris, the capital of perfumery, would offer me this gift. That perfume would, at last, make me a Parisian writer. My story in a bottle. My name on a book.

I can’t imagine anything more glamorous than that, but in the ancient sense of the Scottish word, which is derived from “grammar”: occult learning; magic charm; a haze in the air causing things to take on a different appearance. Those are the very words I would use to describe perfume.

the perfume lover

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Letters About Literature – Our Winners

February 10th, 2012

This year, the American Library in Paris participated for the first time ever in the Letters About Literature contest created by the Library of Congress. The idea was for school-age children to write to an author  who has changed the reader somehow, or changed their view of the world.

We’ve selected two winners from the entries we received, and all of the letters have been sent on to the national contest. The winners chosen by the American Library in Paris are Loic Lescoat (7-8 grade group) and Molly Griffiths (for the high school group). The two young writers were given a set of brand new, award winning books as well as a calligraphy set to encourage their writing. You can read their letters below:

Dear George Orwell,

Before I read 1984, my concept of freedom was very different from what it is now. Before, I thought freedom was something that I didn’t have much of as a child, but would have more of as an adult. Now I understand that it has a much broader meaning.

Freedom is in fact a most precious and precarious thing. It is a notion that has evolved over four millennia since the start of the first civilization to become what it is today. But it could have been wiped out completely multiple times and is a constant, never-ending battle for liberty.

Seeing that the Party members in your book did not have freedom of speech, or even freedom of thought, made me realize how fortunate I am to be able to enjoy this every day. This gratefulness is amplified by the thought of people in some countries in the world who don’t have these very basic rights.

Winston’s only hope to make a difference in the world is by writing in his journal. My possibilities, on the other hand, are endless. I could do research in science to look for an accessible energy source, I could be president and change peoples’ lives, or I could just turn off unneeded lights and conserve energy to battle global warming. When you think about it, so many people today have a chance to have a major impact on the world.

For the first thirty pages of 1984, I didn’t think the story was particularly plausible: I mean, malevolent policemen who can practically read your mind? A world divided into just three countries? And how did the Inner Party members take control anyway? All this seemed completely unrealistic.

1984_2_george_orwellIt was only after doing a bit of reading that I was awoken to the fact that such an oppressive system really was possible, and could have happened quite a few times in history (the German Nazis and Russian Communists), and that 1984 was in fact a message to the world: if totalitarians took power, it would be extremely hard to reverse this change, and after a certain point in time, rebellion would be completely impossible. People would have a hard time communicating their dreams of freedom because of Newspeak and probably wouldn’t want to change things because they would have no memory of what life was like before the Revolution. Humanity would be doomed to never think for themselves again.

This thought led me to promising myself that should anyone attempt to jeopardize even the smallest of freedoms, I will always stand firm in what I believe is right. Recently I thought of you when my very popular friend asked me why I hung out with my other not-so-popular friend. He said that he didn’t see why I liked him. I replied that it was my call as to whether I wanted to be friends with him or not. It was at that moment that I realized how important it was to me to befriend whoever I wanted to, and how happy it made me to meet new people, and I shuddered at the idea of somebody else deciding for me who I should talk to, as was the case for Winston.

Over the two weeks that it has taken me to read your book, I have learned far more than I ever thought a book could teach me: once freedom is acquired, this does not mean that it is ours for keeps. In the future I will remember to fight for a society for the people, by the people. Thank you for your beautiful writing, and I hope it enlightens many others to come.

Sincerely yours,

Loïc Lescoat

Dear Madeleine L’Engle,

People have always told me that I lack confidence in myself. I have rarely been able to compliment or laugh at myself. But then I read Wrinkle in Time, and it made me believe in who I am, because of the way Meg believes in who she is.

The idea of time-travelling had always seemed impossible to me. That was until I met Mrs. Who and her two extraordinary friends. Travelling, or tessering, through galaxies and dimensions you’ve never heard of before, with those three women accompanying you, you wouldn’t think it to be impossible, which it is what the book taught me.

Love is unconditional, a saying that few understand and believe. But sometimes, a person’s capacity to love can change everything. I was touched when Meg saved her brother from IT, by just simply loving him, which made me think that a person’s fate can be changed by love.

I feel connected to this book because I think I am very much like Meg. A misunderstood, self-conscious young girl, willing to go to any lengths to save someone she loves, and who has the strength to love in the face of pure hate.200px-A_wrinkle_in_time_digest_2007

Before I read your book, I would internalize insults and start believing in them, thus losing confidence in myself. Charles Wallace, who is called a “moron”, because he doesn’t speak, while he actually has an advanced knowledge for his age, inspired me to change my view of myself, and stand up to the insulting given to me by people who didn’t actually know me.

Meg and Charles Wallace taught me to stand up for myself, and for others, and to gain confidence. It has changed me because now, I fight back, instead of retreating.

My life will be different from now on, because I have become a new person; a self-confident person, who isn’t afraid of showing who she is.

So I would like to thank you, Madeleine, for helping me realize that I like who I am, and also for teaching to stand up for myself.

Yours sincerely,

Molly Griffiths

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Taking wine and words to new places

February 7th, 2012

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Robert Camuto is a career American journalist who moved to the South of France in 2001 and started snooping around cellars and vineyards to write about the changes taking place in France’s 21st Century Wine World. The product of that Exploration was his first book Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (2008), which was translated in French and has won several prestigious awards. His second book Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (2010) was referred to by Eric Asimov in the New York Times as “beautiful, enthralling work.” Robert writes for several U.S, publications including the Wine Spectator, Food & Wine and the Washington Post Travel. He writes:

Oenologists analyze it, critics grade it, snobs show off with it, some try to politicize it and sommeliers wax eloquent about it —all in an effort to define an experience that is personal and subjective. The more we seem to know about wine the less we understand it.

This might seem like a heresy coming from someone who has spent much of the last decade writing about wine and winemakers, but I think it’s true. The fact that some wines still defy codification makes it worthy of spilling more ink and drink.

My background is journalism, and after moving to the South of France, I started following the currents of French wine. It was a compelling story: after decades of industrialization, new generations of winemakers were returning to smaller production and simpler methods. Forgotten, unknown or unappreciated wine regions were suddenly turning out interesting wines that reflected a sense of place. This renaissance has since spread across Europe and the winegrowing Old World.

My explorations in France and my ancestral terroir of Sicily have led to two critically acclaimed books which feature some of the characters – and I mean characters—that have shaped the world of wine in those places.

These neo-paysans or contadini not only have a far greater contact with and understanding of nature than most of us, but they also tend to be quirky, independent-minded individuals who pour a lot of themselves into what they bottle.

Over the years I have met hundreds of winemakers including refugees of modern society, neo-peasants with degrees in design, eastern philosophy or engineering, aristocrats who view the land practically as a family member, and those who simply have wine in their blood.

Are these personalities evident in their wines? Absolutely.

It is natural that we modern humans have developed technical analysis and a vocabulary for describing wine as well as sophisticated ways to control production and drive the markets. Industrial wine science has developed all kinds of corrections and tricks to make wines that hit all the right notes. You want  “black cherry with hints of tobacco and road tar” you got it. In the luxury wine industry grand crus are traded as if on a stock exchange.

But often our wine vocabulary is often incapable of describing the soul of a soulful wine.  Wine is a living thing that joins us at the table and is a dinner companion among our group. Wines, like people, have moods and personalities that change over time and the seasons and with whom, when and with what they are drunk.

Several years ago, the Cote Rotie winemaker Gilles Barge told me, “A good wine is a wine you find to be good. A great wine is a wine you remember… All the rest is literature.”

He had a point, but that hasn’t stopped me from going deeper into that literature and discovering some surprising wines along the way.

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Fernanda Eberstadt on being an American writer in Europe

January 31st, 2012

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Fernanda Eberstadt is the American expatriate author of five acclaimed novels, Isaac and His Devils, Low Tide, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, The Furies, and her latest – Rat. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Commentary. Her nonfiction book Little Money Street is about the struggle of Gypsies in southwest France, where she lived with her family before returning to London. We look forward to welcoming her to the Library on Wednesday 1 February at 19h30. She writes:

I’m thrilled to be appearing at the American Library and will be talking about the delights and perils of being an American writer in Europe and in particular about my most recent novel, “RAT.”

The novel is named after its heroine, a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the French countryside, raised by a feckless, charmingly narcissistic single mother. Rat has never met her biological father, who lives in London. The person she loves best in the world is her adopted younger brother—the son of her mother’s best friend, an ex-prostitute who died of AIDs—and when her mother’s boyfriend begins to take a sexual interest in the kid, Rat decides it’s time for her and her brother to leave home in search of her father.

Like all my books, RAT is about family.

For years, I’d been haunted by the subject of a child who grows up obsessed by a father she’s never known, and finally sets off to find him for herself. My heroine Rat’s fantasy is that once she’s reunited with this unknown father, he will somehow give her all the steadiness and sense of belonging she’s always lacked.

But of course the reality turns out to be quite different: Her father was a twenty-something-year-old Englishman on a beach-holiday, who had sex one night with a local girl he met in a nightclub. And felt completely outraged when his one-night pickup not only got pregnant, but insisted on having the baby, without his consent.

He goes on to marry a suitable wife to whom he never mentions this traumatic episode; they have a child. And then fifteen-year-old Rat shows up, like Banquo’s ghost, ruining the domestic feast.

The irony of the book is that in the end, her father comes to love this girl he wished had never been born, and to recognize an affinity with her almost deeper—certainly more involuntary, more agonizing–than what he feels for his “real”, lawful family.

RAT raises a lot of crucial contemporary subjects: what is the nature of biological identity, of genetic inheritance? If women have reproductive rights, do men, too? What happens when children are obliged to parent their own parents? What makes a family? (It’s significant that the only “family” in which Rat and her brother feel completely at home is a bunch of anarchist squatters they meet in an abandoned dynamite factory.)

RAT is set in the French Pyrenees, where I spent six crucial years; my children got most of their education in a village school there. We were living on a vineyard half-a-mile from the Mediterranean. The tourist image of the South of France is of Gold Coast glamor, and yet in fact, for all its natural majesty and blessed climate, this area is poor, down-and-out, blighted by political corruption, a honky-tonk stretch of trailer parks and fast-food stalls that are boarded up nine months a year.

In my last book, LITTLE MONEY STREET, I wrote about Gypsies and Arabs in this area. This time, I wanted to write about the white French families who have drifted down here in search of a cheap place in the sun.

One of my aims in this novel was to create a heroine who is genuinely heroic. Surrounded by dangerously needy adults, Rat is obliged from a young age to become a kind of mother to her younger brother, feeding him, clothing him, protecting him from harm.

I’ve always loved children’s books. One thing I’ve noticed, reading aloud a whole new generation of writers to my own children, is that the world of children’s literature is astonishingly dark. The best children’s writers are tough-minded: they do not shrink from exposing their characters to wrenching ordeals and moral dilemmas. Yet, unlike the heroes of most contemporary “adult” fiction, those of children’s books tend to meet adversity with pluck and resourcefulness. You read Philip Pullman’s Lyra trilogy, and you want to be as brave as she is.

I wanted to do something similar in RAT: to create a heroine who raises a reader’s spirits.

RAT is my own way of grappling a very particular cultural problem. I think of myself as being a New York writer. Yet for most of the last twelve years, I’ve been living in rural France, my children have been going to school in French, and our outside life has been largely conducted in French. In 2009, we moved to London. Closer, but still not Manhattan.

Which means that the daily sights, sounds, smells, opinions, attitudes, pop culture that have been feeding my fiction for the last decade-plus are a European mishmash. The world is indeed becoming Americanized, but the music Rat and her friends listen to, their language and expectations and cultural assumptions are not the same as American kids’. The “New York” of my imagination, the New York in which I grew up, is by now about as archaeological a relic as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Warsaw.

RAT is written in American English, but it’s my first work of fiction whose characters and setting are a hundred percent European.

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Little Rat Makes Music

January 24th, 2012

Little Rat Makes Music, by Monika Bang-Campbell, Illustrated by Molly Bang

Reviewed by Liz Gomes

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Little Rat wants to learn how to play the violin and make wonderful music like what she hears in concerts.  But for her to do so, she needs to practice, which is not so easy, it is boring and her violin can make horrible noises.

This inspiring tale tells how Little Rat, while learning to play the violin, goes through some difficulties, but after a lot of practice, she can create beautiful music.

A great story for parents who wants to teach their children how ‘practice makes perfect’.

You can find Little Rat Makes Music in the Children’s Library with the I CAN READ books under EB.

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Sophie Hardach on Forced Marriages in France

January 23rd, 2012

sophie hardach

Sophie Hardach wrote her novel The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages while working as a journalist for Reuters in Paris. Originally inspired by the fragments of stories she was told while out on various reporting assignments, the novel follows the intertwining lives of a Kurdish boy struggling to build a life in Europe and a Registrar working at a Parisian town hall. Today, Sophie writes about the French pamphlet that inspired the novel:

Inspiration comes in many different forms: a thunderbolt, a light bulb, or, in the case of my first novel, a pamphlet printed by the French government.

About three years ago, I was working as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Paris when the French government launched a campaign against forced marriages. I interviewed some activists in the field – like the victims, many were of North African, Turkish, Kurdish or Senegalese descent – and was struck not just by the fact that the problem persisted, but that it was much more pressing than I had expected. During one interview in a cramped little office in a Parisian suburb, staffed by one lone activist and her assistant, the phone kept ringing with calls from girls seeking help. A rescue mission for a girl whose parents had already booked her ticket to the country where she would be married off against her will was planned for that night. Another organisation had just taken in a girl whose own grandmother tied her to a bed on the wedding night – and this happened not in some remote, deserted location, but in the trendy 10th arrondissement.

So the French government decided it was time to do something, and one of the things it did was print a peppy, pink-and-red little pamphlet titled “Prévention des Mariages Forcés – Guide à l’usage des élu/es“. It was a guide for bureaucrats in town halls all over France who might unwittingly preside over forced marriages. It was also, in a way, a tour through the hopes and dilemmas of modern France, or rather, a France that is figuring out how to be modern. There was great idealism in the way the pamphlet directly addressed the reader: you – yes, you, mayor of Boondocks-Sur-Seine – you too can be a soldier in the fight for good. But just how that fight should be fought wasn’t quite clear. The intention was there, but as soon as it went into detail, the guide sounded curiously helpless. So how do you spot a forced marriage? Well, apparently an age difference of 10 years is a bit suspicious, and so is a “menacing attitude” by the bride’s entourage. Certain communities are singled out as higher-risk, but there’s also a stern warning not to become too wary of foreign and mixed marriages as that would be against the European Convention of Human Rights.

Sitting in a press conference under the high stone arches of an old Parisian town hall, I pictured an anonymous official reading the guide and scratching her head: “Hmmm…they say that ‘Yes’ does not always imply consent…I’m meant to be suspicious if the bride cries…and then alert the prosecutor if I think it’s a forced marriage… but oh dear, if I get it wrong, I’ll have an enraged bride, groom and two families accusing me of ruining their big day!”

It’s not surprising that a real-life French official told me he didn’t know anyone who used the guide.

And one of the seasoned, tough activists I interviewed simply said: “There’s no way the girl would show any opposition once they’re all at the town hall. There’s simply no way she would suddenly confide in the mayor, or cry or something like that. She’d feel like a traitor.”

Incidentally, that activist’s organisation – Elele, which mainly advised Turkish and Kurdish girls – had to close down in 2010 after its government subsidies dried up. Elele was listed in the Mariages Forcés pamphlet, but that did not protect it from the budget cuts. Given this rather depressing development, it would be easy to write off the pink pamphlet as yet another example of political cynicism: print a few thousand brochures with great fanfare and lots of press coverage, then withdraw funds from the very people who are helping the victims.

And yet, something about the pamphlet stuck with me. It seemed to encapsulate so many of the issues we grapple with today, and have grappled with through the ages: whether, and how, a society should interfere with a private issue such as marriage; whether it’s better to stay out of certain conflicts and risk being accused of turning a blind eye, or try to help and perhaps make the situation worse.

The news cycle soon moved on to the burqa ban and the economy, but in my spare time I continued to think about all those questions, and about migration in general, and about my own experiences as a migrant in particular. Eventually I wrote a novel: “The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages”. It’s about a woman who works at a Parisian town hall, about her friendship with Selim, a Kurdish refugee, and about a pact they made in the past that overshadows the present. The manual in the novel is fictional, though it shares some characteristics with the original, such as a fondness for capital letters and exclamation marks. Since the book was published in April 2011, I’ve had lots of interesting comments from readers. Some are especially intrigued by Selim’s story, since the plight of the Kurds is not a common subject in fiction. Others see it as a story about identity, or about the joys and challenges of multi-culturalism. And others again simply read it as a story of two people trying to make their way through this often delightful, often bewildering world.

registrar 2

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Interview with Arthur Phillips

January 18th, 2012

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Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.

His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen “Best of 2004” lists. Angelica, his third novel, made The Washington Post best fiction list of 2007 and led that paper to call him “One of the best writers in America.” The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, on the Post’s best of 2009 list, and inspired Kirkus to write, “Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade.”

His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published to critical acclaim, including being named a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Where did The Tragedy of Arthur begin?

I have started novels from many of those places: a setting, a plot twist, a character.  But in this case, it started from what I can only call a dare.  I simply wondered one day, what would I have to learn to be able to write a Shakespeare play?  A peculiar thought, I’ll admit, but one that got under my skin in the most irritating way.  I was halfway through writing a different novel and most of the time I was itching to start work on this ill-defined forgery scheme…

Can you tell us about being a five-time Jeopardy champion?

Trivia has always stuck to me.  I know a very small amount about a lot of things, and a lot about… nothing.  Turns out that, plus quick thumb-muscle reflexes and a willingness to risk public humiliation makes for a successful gameshow career.  I was on in 1996, not long after my wife and I got married and she was beginning to despair about my earning potential.

What books are on your nightstand?

Last great book I completed: Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis. Currently reading Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro, author of Contested Will and 1599.  Next up: the new Ron Rash novel The Cove.

What is the best advice you have ever received?

I don’t know about the best ever, but I read this today and liked it.  I’ll say it’s the best advice I’ve received today:

” Look at getting published the same way that career criminals look at getting arrested. Sure, there is validation in it. And people will know what you did, why, and how. But the crime is the fun part and getting away with it is even better.”– http://www.fictioncircus.com/

What advice would you give to beginning writers?

Since we’re tapping into their wisdom today, I liked this, too:

“Getting rejected by magazines you don’t read or editors you don’t know isn’t real rejection. It is just unsuccessful adultery.”– http://www.fictioncircus.com/

What are you looking forward to doing while you are in Paris?

I lived for two of my happiest years in Paris, writing my second novel here, so I am likely to indulge in some serious nostalgia, walking, gazing, sighing, recalling.  That and seeing old friends at old favorite restaurants.

What’s next?

I’ve been working on television scripts at the moment, trying to find my feet in a new medium.  Then…back to novels.

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Ghostgirl

January 18th, 2012

Ghostgirl, written by Tonya Hurley200px-Ghostgirl_bookcover

Recommended by Children’s Library volunteer Christel Prestige

Charlotte Usher feels practically invisible at school, she is desperate to be popular to try and attract Damen’s attention. And then one miserable day, she dies of the most unbelievable death: she chokes on a gummy bear! Alone, once again! However, Charlotte isn’t going to let the little inconvenience of being dead get in her way…

Check out Ghostgirl, it’s new @ the Library. You can find it with the Young Adult fiction on the Teen Mezzanine under J HUR (YA).

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Cherie Burns on Fashion Icon Millicent Rogers

January 11th, 2012

cherie burns

Cherie Burns is the author of Searching for Beauty–The Life of Millicent Rogers, the first comprehensive biography of the Standard Oil heiress and fashion icon.

Raised in the Gilded Age of New York society, Rogers came of age as a debutante and flapper. She eloped with an impoverished European nobleman and lived with three husbands in high-living pre-war Europe. During WWII she returned to the U.S to pitch into the war effort, and at war’s end she followed American glamour–and Clark Gable–to Hollywood. Her last reincarnation was in Taos, New Mexico where she fell in love with the Pueblo Indians and re-imagined southwestern style for her followers in the New York fashion world.

Rogers was considered the first American woman with real style to merit the admiration of Parisian couturiers and fashion arbiters. Beautiful, rich, spirited and always impeccably dressed, Rogers re-invented herself with every decade of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In addition to Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns is author of The Great Hurricane: 1938, of which  Liz Smith  wrote in her column in The Daily News: “A must if you care about brilliant reporting…” and Stepmotherhood—How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out or Wicked.  It  has sold over 40,000 copies in the U.S., England and Germany and remains in print after twenty years. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine,The Wall Street Journal, People, Glamour, New York, and Sports Illustrated. She now lives primarily in Taos, New Mexico.

Cherie Burns writes: People frequently ask me how and why I became interested in writing about Millicent Rogers. I first took note of Rogers when I visited the museum named after her in Taos, New Mexico when I came to Taos with my family to ski in the 1990s.   I didn’t know much about her and the name blurred with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothy Brett, Frieda Lawrence and Georgia O’Keefe, other famous women who found their way to New Mexico and left an impression with their bohemian ways, flair, mischief and artistry. One cannot but wonder at the photos of Frieda Lawrence, D.H.’s wife, with the cigarette dangling from her lip,  O’Keefe, the severe artist with her tight kerchiefs, magisterial Mabel and  eccentric Brett.   It was not until I came to live in Taos in 2005 that I routinely visited the Millicent Rogers Museum, and Millicent Rogers began to come into focus for me. She was an elegant beauty,  mysterious and evocative because less was known publicly about her life. I often took visitors to the adobe museum on the edge of town to show them the regional artistry and New Mexican sensibility on display there. Waiting for them in the lobby, I had time to study the likenesses of Millicent on the walls.

millicent rogers 2

The more I looked into her legend and realized that of her 51 year-long life, only six of those years were lived in Taos, the more intrigued I became.  Though she is associated in the modern public consciousness with  New Mexico, she lived most of her life in New York and Europe, tripping the light fantastic wherever she went. Researching her life story gave me the opportunity to learn more about Taos, and to fill in my dearth of knowledge about the 1930s and 40s, Millicent’s heydays, in both fashion and political history.

Millicent H Rogers dying her own textiles in the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Taos, NM 1948.

Millicent H Rogers dying her own textiles in the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Taos, NM 1948.

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