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Beautiful Darkness Giveaway HOM + 100 = SATC?

Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl have captured a lot of attention among young -- and not-so-young -- fans of mystery and paranormal romance.  With the paperback edition of last year's Beautiful Creatures still on the New York Times best seller list for young people, the brand new sequel, Beautiful Darkness, joined the list on October 22nd.  

Garcia and Stohl weave a complex tale of a sleepy southern town where things are not all as they seem.  Beneath the surface are subterranean passageways, dark secrets, and family curses.  Throw in some witchy magic, a teenage love affair, a strong, dangerous heroine, and a sensitive young man with a keen appreciation of his girlfriend's fashion sense, and you have a story guaranteed to please young readers and quite a few grown-ups as well. 

A third installment of what is now being called "The Caster Chronicles" is expected next year, as is a film version of Beautiful Creatures.

Both books are available on Playaway, and it turns out that the authors are huge Playaway fans.  They are currently offering visitors to their website a chance to win one of five copies of Beautiful Darkness on Playaway.  The contest ends on Sunday November 7.  As of this writing, there were only about 40 entries, so the odds are attractive.

 

 

Did you catch last week's edition of Studio 360 from WNYC in New York and Public Radio International?  As part of their ongoing "American Icons" series, they examined Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth.  If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to the show online.

Edith Wharton's career spanned more than 40 years. She published her first book of verses in 1878 at the age of 16. She wrote 22 novels, 3 books of poetry, 13 short story collections, and 9 works of non-fiction. The House of Mirth was her fourth novel and her first major hit. Published in 1905, when Wharton was 43, it sold 140,000 copies in its first year -- a huge best seller at the time.

Wharton lived in France during the First World War and wrote numerous dispatches (including from the front lines) for Scribner's magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature -- in 1920, for The Age of Innocence.

105 years later, The House of Mirth continues to have a devoted following, and as Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson asserts, it still "feels strangely modern."

The story takes place in New York City just before the turn of the 20th Century and just before the book's central character, Lily Bart, turns 30 without yet having married. The book follows smart, witty, beautiful Lily in her relentless quest for a husband and a solid marriage that will secure her position in the privileged society of the Gilded Age.

Studio 360's Anderson and segment producer Michele Siegel, draw numerous parallels between the world presented in House of Mirth and that depicted in Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (published in 1996). They argue that Bushnell -- like Wharton -- is a commentator on the world of New York privilege and power. Deborah German, a lecturer at London's Roehampton University, is quoted as saying that the two writers moved "in similar circles 100 years apart."

Though much has changed for women in the past 100 years, the similarity of themes is striking -- simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the workings of high society, a yearning for security but also a desire for independence, gender inequity, and the complexities of what marriage represents both practically and symbolically.

In fact, Bushnell herself goes so far as to acknowledge that she and a close friend had read The House of Mirth shortly before she began work on Sex and the City and that the two had vowed never to end up like poor Lily Bart. For Bushnell, the message in Wharton's work is that, "if you are kind of hoping that in some way you're going to be saved by society -- you really may not be."

As professor of American Literature, Hildegard Hoeller puts it, a century after The House of Mirth's publication, readers still identify with Lily because "most of us are quite entrapped ourselves."

We have two excellent versions of The House of Mirth available on Playaway as well as Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, narrated by Cynthia Nixon.  I think they would make a great pairing for a book discussion group.

For more on The House of Mirth, visit Studio 360's "American Icons" page, where you'll find a slide show on Wharton and a web-extra interview in which Jonathan Franzen discusses The House of Mirth with Kurt Anderson and explains why its one of his all-time favorite books.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Loud Noises in Oslo

Giant anacondas in the sewers of Oslo?

Corporate espionage and theft of intellectual property?

A limitless, renewable fuel source that might propel humanity to the stars?

I'm getting ahead of myself.

You may not have heard of Jo Nesbø, but he's actually one of the most popular writers in Norway, where he has sold over 1.5 million copies of his eight "Harry Hole" detective novels.

After 10 years of writing crime novels, Nesbø took up the challenge of children's fiction. The result, in 2007, was Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder, an irresistibly funny short novel set in modern-day Oslo.

Since 2001, Bruce Coville's Full Cast Audio has been turning out magnificent multi-voiced productions of great contemporary children's literature as well as a few "modern classics." There are more than 80 unabridged Full Cast titles available on Playaway .

For the last couple of years, in addition to its trademark full-cast productions, FCA, under the imprint of "Full Cast - OneVoice", has also put out a handful of titles that are narrated by a single, versatile reader. Two of these OneVoice titles -- Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder and A Dog On His Own -- make use of the prolific and extremely talented narrator William Dufris. The Doctor Proctor book launched on Playaway in September. and I confess that the title caught my eye. But it was with slight trepidation that I started to listen.

The fart jokes begin about 12 minutes in -- that is if you don't count the comical tuba music that introduces the production. I hasten to point out, however, that the phenomena caused by the miraculous invention of the eccentric Doctor Proctor, though extremely loud, are non-odorous, and likewise, the humor manages to steer clear of being overly raunchy.

This isn't the first kid's book to take on the subject of flatulence, and I daresay it will not be the last. And really, why should it be?  After all, the subject is a proven crowd-pleaser.

In fact, the book is full of humor, and most of it is non-scatological in nature. In addition to the topics I noted at the outset, the story deals with:  the true meaning of Norwegian Independence Day; big, angry men in gigantic gas-guzzling Hummers; schoolyard bullying; marching bands; and the longest car chase in Norwegian history.

Akershus Fortress on the Oslofjord
Dufris has a field day with the material, producing a wide array of goofy voices and displaying perfect comic pitch in his interpretation of the carefully constructed story. I don't know how it reads in Norwegian, but credit must be given to translator Tara Chace, who renders it very smoothly into an extremely entertaining narrative in English.

With a run time of about 4 hours, this would be a perfect kid's audiobook for a car trip. The two heroes are 10-year-old Lisa and the new arrival to her neighborhood, a boy of the same age named Nilly. It's difficult to imagine a boy or girl between the ages of 8 and 12 who would not find this story engaging and highly amusing -- potentially just the ticket for reluctant readers. And if someone encourages them to find Oslo on the map, they might even learn a little bit of geography.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
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More Than Zero

Did you catch the highly entertaining back-to-back interviews with authors Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney on NPR's All Things Considered on Saturday July 31? (If you missed them, you can listen online: Segment 1: Bret Easton Ellis. Segment 2: Jay McInerney.)

Both authors burst on the literary scene in the mid-eighties, and both were notorious for their depictions of the excesses of that era. Now both are back in the spotlight:

Earlier this year, Ellis published his first book in five years, Imperial Bedrooms -- a sequel to his debut novel, Less Than Zero. 

Meanwhile, McInerney's 2009 collection of short stories How it Ended, was released in paperback this past Spring, and it was recently announced that Josh Schwartz, co-creator of the CW TV network's "Gossip Girl" series, will direct a film remake of Bright Lights, Big City.

Both of these guys are so agile and glib -- such good storytellers -- that the interviews whizzed along, barely giving listeners the chance to appreciate the interviewees' authorly labor in framing delicate issues and sidestepping unsavory details. So for those of you who missed it, or weren't sure what you were hearing:

Yes, Bret Easton Ellis did say that one of the characters in his 2005 novel Lunar Park was based on Jay McInerney.   (He advised all other writers to avoid repeating this trick themselves -- "Never put Jay McInerney in a book -- he'll fall apart!")

Yes, the character of Allison Poole, who first appeared in McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life, is based on his real-life friend Rielle Hunter (born Lisa Jo Druck).  And yes, she's the one who had an affair in 2007 with then-presidential candidate John Edwards and bore his child. Alison Poole reappears in McInerney's 2008 story "Penelope on the Pond" (included in How It Ended).  McInerney described the tale as the product of his own speculation about what was going on with his old friend when she disappeared from view in late 2007.

But wait! It gets even weirder, because Ellis used McInerney's Alison Poole character in two of his own novels, American Psycho (1991) and Glamorama (1998). A little confusing, yes, but par for the course, given Ellis' famous penchant for recurring characters and semi-autobiographical story lines. Add to this the fact that -- back in the glamour days -- Ellis, McInerney, and their various friends and acquaintances were all themselves frequent characters in stories told by the media, and one realizes that the interconnections, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and the frequent re-makings of personal identity really should come as no surprise.

If all this entices you to dip into the wild worlds of Messrs. McInerney and Ellis, Playaway offers several choices: 

Ellis' American Psycho and Glamorama officially launched on Playaway on September 1, 2010 -- both are productions of Audible.com.  And coming in January: Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers (a collection of short stories).

McInerney's How It Ended (produced by Blackstone Audio) was released for the first time on audio earlier this year.

Doubtless, we have not yet heard the last from either of these "formerly young" (but still vital) authors, nor have we seen the last of some of their most colorful characters.  Be careful if you bump into them -- you could end up in a book.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
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Don't Spoil the Ending - Tinkers by Paul Harding

I'm about half way through listening to the Brilliance Audio/Audible.com production of Tinkers, so I'm as interested as the next listener in not having the ending spoiled for me.

The risk seems minimal, however, because author Paul Harding's first sentence informs his readers that the story begins 8 days before the death of its central character, retired high school guidance counselor and clock-repairer, George Washington Crosby.

From there the story moves backward and forward in time, much in the manner of George's deathbed hallucinations. "George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control."

In fact, the entire book is a stream of consciousness recollection of George's life and that of his oddball father, Howard, a "tinker" who drove a horse-drawn wagon down country roads and lanes, pedaling soap, needles, tobacco, and other household necessities. Periodically, Howard is beset by epileptic seizure's that tear his world apart and  prompt him to ponder life's mysteries.

The narrative shifts in time, changes perspective, omits quotation marks entirely, and returns again and again to George on his deathbed, as his last eight days of life run down like one of the many antique clocks he lovingly restored. Life itself, the author seems to suggest, is a complex clockwork of inter-related gears and springs, in which small motions are magnified and transfered across time. Sometimes the whole machine "whirs with brass logic," and other times faulty alignments may cause it to "squeak and gibber."

For George's father Howard, the clockwork mechanism of the universe periodically flew to pieces when his grand mal seizures transported him from his day-to-day world into an alternate existence in which he communed with nature, wrote poetry, and speculated on the meaning of life. While his family sat at the dinner table, their food untouched, waiting for his return.

Howard thinks of his epileptic seizures as bolts of lightning that, in striking him, cause the mysterious curtain of existence to be briefly lifted, allowing him tantalizing glimpses of what lies on the other side. Deep questions for an uneducated tinker to ponder, and not at all the sort of stuff that interests his bitter and long-suffering wife. The lightning metaphor is repeated throughout the book, and son George is even struck by a literal bolt of it as he builds the house in which we find him on his deathbed at the book's beginning.

This book barely saw the light of day, by the way, let alone winning a Pulitzer Prize eariler this year to the surprise of almost everyone. Tinkers is Harding's first published novel, and it was rejected by agent after agent and publisher after publisher. In the end, it was picked up by the tiny Indy publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, and sold all of 7,000 copies before winning the prize.

Though hardly a blockbuster, Harding's book became a favorite of independent booksellers, and through one of them was brought to the attention of Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, chair of this year's Pulitzer fiction committee.

I'm only half way through, but I'm loving it.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

From Denmark to Ireland by Way of Brooklyn

"The sky was swept of clouds when I noticed a figure bent over his broke-down 1950 Vincent Comet dream machine and cursing under his breath. I slowed on my bicycle, not thinking he'd notice. But he turned to face me on the narrow street. And with one look, he cracked me open like a safe and stole everything inside."

So begins Darling Jim, Christian Moerk's impressive debut novel, the Tantor Audio edition of which won the Audio Publishers Association's "Audie" award last May in the category of "Thriller-Suspense". It was up against some pretty stiff competition, including recent works from Greg Iles and Elmore Leonard.

Moerk is a 40-year-old writer, born and raised in Denmark who came to the U.S. for college, received a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, worked in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, wrote for the New York Times, and now resides in Brooklyn. He spent considerable time in Dublin during his days in the film industry, and he does quite a good job evoking the accents, slang expressions, and locales of modern-day, small-town Ireland.

Dual narrators, Stephen Hoye and Justine Eyre, worked hard for that Audie, and, like the author's, their evocations of Ireland are convincing. Raised in New England, Hoye studied and worked in London theater for 20 years. Eyre is a Nova Scotian Canadian by birth, spent much of her childhood in the Phillipines where she was educated at British schools, then trained in theater at McGill University in Toronto.

(Fans of vampire lit -- and who is not? -- may be interested to note that Eyre was involved in another male-female co-narration: the Books on Tape library edition of Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 best-seller The Historian, co-narrated with Paul Michael. She can also be heard reading the forthcoming vamp mash-up, Dracula My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker -- due in August from Tantor Audio and available on Playaway this Fall.)

Moerk's inspiration for Darling Jim was an Irish newspaper story about an aunt and three nieces found dead in the house in which they'd lived for months as shut-ins. From this gruesome starting point, Moerk imagines an irresistable vintage-motorcycle-riding, silver-tongued, blue-eyed shanachie or story-teller who leaves a convoluted trail of mayhem that must be pieced together by the novel's characters and readers alike. The book was first published in Denmark in 2007. The first U.S. edition was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and received very favorable notices -- a starred review in Publishers Weekly and raves from Booklist and The Washington Post.

The story is told in three parts that interweave an after-the-fact third-person narrative (read by Hoye) with two separate diaries written by two of the three sisters and read by Eyre. Each narrator does an impressive number of distinct voices and accents. Hoye's section is focussed primarily on a hapless but determined young artist and postal clerk named Niall. Eyre is especially convincing in her strikingly different renditions of the three sisters.

Typically for this genre, a goodly amount of the willing suspension of disbelief is required of the reader, but those willing to go along for the ride will be rewarded with an entertaining yarn, rendered skillfully for audio and justly deserving of its recent Audie award.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
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Life is Not a Drip - Life is a Flame! Sir Salman Rushdie Dazzles ALA Audience

This past Saturday afternoon in Washington, DC, Sir Salman Rushdie drew a large audience to his lively and engaging talk, part of the ALA Auditorium Speaker Series.

He spent most of his time discussing his forthcoming book Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to 1990's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun was Rushdie's first book since a fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 as punishment for his novel The Satanic Verses, which the cleric deemed to have been a work of blasphemy.

Haroun was the story of a boy's quest to, as Rushdie put it, "rescue his father's storytelling skills in a world in which stories were being poisoned." He wrote it for his elder son, Zafar, then nine years old, at a time, said Rushdie, when he had become "uncharacteristically interested in happy endings."

It was only after the book had been published, Rushdie said, that he came to think of it as a work that was "written to please a certain child" -- placing it in a tradition that includes Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and Peter Pan.

Nearly 20 years later, Rushdie's second son, Milan, came to him and asked "'where's my book?'" Guided by the example of Lewis Carroll writing Through the Looking-Glass as a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Rushdie decided he owed his younger son a book of his own.

By the time Carroll wrote Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 6 years had passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll was estranged from the Liddell family, Alice Liddell, his inspiration, was no longer a child but a young woman of 19, and the first Alice book was famous. "How scary it must have been to write a sequel," said Rushdie, who confessed that, for the first time in his career, he found himself dealing with the same pressure.

"Through the Looking-Glass is not 'Return to Wonderland,' " said Rushdie. Like Carroll, he wanted to employ the same central characters but create another imaginative world, wholly different from the original. "I didn't want to do 'Return to the Sea of Stories,' " said Rushdie.

“Through the Looking-Glass is NOT

'Return to Wonderland'.  I didn't want to

do 'Return to the Sea of Stories'...”

And so, whereas the central metaphor of Haroun was water, Rushdie decided to make Luka about fire. Rushdie read aloud a short passage from the book in which a character compares the relative merits of fire and water and exclaims, "Life is not a drip. Life is a flame!" and "Life is not wet, young man -- life burns!"

Rushdie described the new novel as an exploration of "the love and the problems between fathers and sons" and as a book in which the author, now 20 years older than when he wrote Haroun, contemplates the hard facts of mortality. This time, story teller Rashid Khalifa is himself at risk -- not just his story-telling abilities. Death appears as a character in the novel, and Rushdie said that, at first, he was concerned he might have made him too disturbing a figure for children. He tried it out on young Milan (then age 12) and found it was actually the boy's favorite character in the entire book.

"I give all the credit to Darth Vader," said Rushdie. "Thanks to George Lucas, everyone now understands it's the bad guy who's the most interesting." In comparison, he said, Luke Skywalker is "a pathetic little drip."

Rushdie said he was interested in the relationship "between the world of the imaginary and the real world." "We live in an imaginary world in the real world," he said. "Mythology is the name we give to what was originally religion. Something good happens when people stop believing -- it becomes literature." However, "it's not so good for the gods -- now they're just a story," as Luka, the hero of the new book, discovers when he stumbles into a junkyard of deposed gods.

"Young readers don't need to dwell on these matters," said Rushdie, but he expressed the hope that -- as with the works of Lewis Carroll -- older readers will find layers of meaning worthy of grown-up attention.

"If I do it properly," said Rushdie, "it could demolish the boundary between adult and children's literature" -- like a movie that's not exclusively for kids or adults but "just for whoever shows up." His wish, he said, is that, "the same child can read the book again as a grown-up and get some slightly different satisfactions."

If Luka and the Fire of Life is up to Rushdie's previous standards, the satisfactions will no doubt be numerous and considerable.

During a question and answer period, Rushdie revealed himself to be a fan of audiobooks and said he was "really happy" that his second novel, Midnight's Children is finally available as an audiobook. (The book won the 1981 Man Booker Prize and was awarded "Best of the Bookers" in 1993 and 2008, celebrating it as the best novel to receive the prize in the first 25 and 40 years of Booker history).

For me, a delightful surprise came when an audience member asked Rushdie to comment on the similarities between The Satanic Verses and Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which readers of this blog may have seen me extol on more than one occasion (see my posts from 18 December 2009 and 19 May 2010).

Rushdie answered that Bulgakov's book was "the most helpful" thing he read in preparation for writing The Satanic Verses and that he was inspired by it's inter-woven narrative strands. He noted that one of Bulgakov's story lines is a retelling of the life of Jesus, just as one of Rushdie's was "a variant retelling of a different prophet." He concluded by observing that the two books had initially met similar fates -- involving banning of the text and persecution of the author.

The event was recorded in full by ALA, although it's not clear at present if the audio will be posted online for download. I'll pass that information along when it becomes available.

In the meantime, listeners interested in Rushdie's work can find three of his titles -- Midnight's Children (1981), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008) -- available on Playaway from Recorded Books.

Luka and the Fire of Life promises to be full of the same sort of wildly imaginative characters and fanciful wordplay that made Haroun and the Sea of Stories a joy to read. Rushdie tantalized his audience with sketches of the dictatorial, deference-demanding rats who constitute an autocratic government body known as "The Respectorate" and the disrespectful princess (the "Insultana") who defies them.

The new book will be published in print by Random House on 16 November 2010, along with an audiobook edition from Recorded Books. That should give everyone plenty of time to read (or re-read) the escapades of Haroun in preparation for encountering the new adventures of his younger brother.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Philip Pullman: Good Man or Scoundrel?

Philip Pullman's retelling of the Gospels will not be everyone's cup of theological tea (as evidenced by its underwhelming first print run of only 50,000 -- the "His Dark Materials" series has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide -- and its publication in the U.S. by independent press Canongate rather than by Random House). But for inquisitive students of Christianity, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a thought-provoking exploration of myth-making and morality.

The book was published in print in the U.S. on April 1 (by Canongate U.S., now a division of independent publisher Grove-Atlantic). The Playaway version launches May 20, simultaneously with other audio formats.

Pullman is not the first fiction writer to imagine an alternate version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov presented the disciple Matthew as a not-so-reliable reporter of Jesus' time in Jerusalem. And Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, imagined a Jesus who returned to earth and found himself at odds with the Church.

Pullman's story also fits within a very well-developed body of scholarship on the historical and literary process of Biblical canonization. In Pullman's tale, Jesus' twin brother, Christ, is an ardent admirer of the preacher of Galilee but also a skillful author and editor in his own right.

All of this might be more than a little confusing to a Sunday school class who's only exposure to the Bible has been in the context of religious instruction. But for those students -- young and old, both believers and non-believers -- who are interested in a scholarly approach to religion, Pullman's work has much to offer.

Beyond whatever philosophical points Pullman may be trying to make with his book (a self-described atheist, he has spoken publicly about his desires to de-mystify and undermine Christian beliefs -- statements that have made him an enemy to many practicing Christians), The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is also a carefully crafted and captivating story.

And the audiobook version is magnificently narrated by the author himself. If you've heard the Random House Audio productions of the "His Dark Materials" books, featuring Pullman and a full cast, you'll know what a talented reader he is. If you haven't heard him before, this engaging three-and-a-half-hour work is a good way to introduce yourself to his skills as a voice actor.

For more of the man himself, take a listen to NPR's recent story about Pullman and his latest work. Among other things, he recounts his discussion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and says he hopes his book will send readers back to the Bible for their own re-examination of the Gospels.

And, if you're interested in critical Bible studies, here are a few Playaway titles to consider as companion listening:

Bart Ehrman: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2008), and, available on Playaway from Recorded Books: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).

Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant (2007); What Paul Meant (2007)

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (particularly the section known as "The Grand Inquisitor").

Off to Book Expo America next week. If you'll be attending, come visit Playaway at Booth #4077.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Bankers, Singers, and Writers: Pulitzer Prize and NBCC Winners on Playaway (With a little Hank Williams thrown in for good measure.)

First things first: The correct pronunciation of "Pulitzer" (according to the folks at Columbia University who administer the Pulitzer Prize) is "PULL it sir". You may hear people saying "PEW lit sir," but those folks must be thinking of The Pew Charitable Trust or perhaps the character of Blind Pew in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (that's him as imagined by N.C. Wyeth on the artwork for the Blackstone Audio edition).

Now that we've got that cleared up... on Monday April 12, the Pulitzer Board announced the 2010 awards in Journalism, Letters, Drama, and Music. This year's winner in the History category was Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, available unabridged on Playaway from Tantor Audio.

Ahamed's book is a detailed examination of the careers of four men who's names are now all but forgotten but who were at the very center of the economic crisis that became the Great Depression. The four were:  Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of the Banque de France, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Though all were brilliant and dynamic figures, Ahamed blames the out-dated thinking and ill-fated decisions of these key central bankers for plunging the world into crisis.

Ahamed uses these four figures both to try to bring the dimensions of a global economic disaster down to a more human scale and also to exemplify the different national personalities of what were at the time the world's four economic superpowers.  Also prominently featured in the book is John Maynard Keynes, who represented a completely new way of thinking about world economics and central banking.

Ahamed himself is an economist and investment manager, and, interestingly, this is his very first book. Students of history (and of our present economic dangers) will find it highly readable, and, thanks to the capable narration of Stephen Hoye, highly listenable as well.

This year in the category of music, the Pulitzer Board awarded a posthumous "Special Citation" to country music legend Hiram King "Hank" Williams. His contributions to the understanding of global economics included the hit songs, "I Wish I Had a Nickel," "The Tramp on the Street," and "Wealth Won't Save Your Soul" (not to mention "There's a Tear in My Beer").

Elsewhere in the world of literary prizes, earlier this month The National Book Critics Circle announced their annual awards for the best books of 2009 in six categories. The winner for biography was Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life. The audiobook version, produced by Blackstone Audio and narrated by the talented and prolific Grover Gardner, is available on Playaway.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

A is for APA... G is for Grafton... P is for PLA... Top mystery writers (and narrator) enthrall audience at PLA dinner

For audiobook fans, the Audio Publishers Association audiobook dinner is always one of the brightest moments of the biennial Public Library Association conference. This year in Portland, a crowd of around 600 turned out to hear an exceptionally entertaining line-up of speakers: best-selling mystery/suspense authors Chelsea Cain, Marcia Muller, and Sue Grafton, along with Judy Kaye,  accomplished stage actress and the longtime narrator of Grafton's super-popular "alphabet mysteries" series.

The evening started off with a paean to both libraries and audiobooks from Chelsea Cain, author of Evil at Heart (2009), Sweetheart (2008), and Heartsick (2007), all of which feature detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell. (The 38-year-old Portland author has also written 5 other books including a 2004 parody of Nancy Drew, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth.)

Cain told a not-uncommon story among writers -- a bookish childhood spent carrying armloads of titles home from the library every week. Cain's own version involved a confession of being left unattended for long hours at the library by a harried single mom. Librarians, she said, save more lives than doctors.

Cain's happy ending came when, after years of renting audiobooks on cassette, she finally met -- and eventually married -- the guy from the tape rental company, who now works for a living as... A LIBRARIAN. Needless to say, the crowd loved this.

Next up was Marcia Muller who talked about her popular Sharon McCone series and confessed that she can't bear to read her own work after it's been published (too great an urge to mark it up with a blue pencil) but that she can LISTEN to the audiobook version and thereby hear the voice of her heroine in a new way. She shared selections from a large collection of favorite e-mails from her readers, each sample strangely "off" in one way or another.  For example: "I love having your books on audio. Now I don't have to read them."

Nine of Muller's novels are available on Playaway. Click here, to see them all. Two other titles, including her most recent, Locked In, are available on Playaway from BBC Audiobooks America.

By the way, Muller is married to author Bill Pronzini, and they are the only married couple to have each been named a "Grand Master" by the Mystery Writers of America.

Narrator Judy Kaye, whose stellar stage career has included a Tony award for Carlotta in "Phantom of the Opera" and a lengthy run in the original cast of "Mama Mia," declared that narrating Sue Grafton's alphabet series has been "one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life" -- no small claim for one so accomplished. She called the Grafton books the most popular thing she's ever been involved in, which ought to tell you something about just how huge Grafton's fan base is.

And then came the mistress herself. Grafton's alphabet mysteries (which she's been writing at the rate of nearly one per year since 1982) have sold in the hundreds of millions and been translated into over two dozen languages. The audiobook versions alone have sold over 1.75 million copies.

Like her series heroine, Kinsey Milhone, Grafton spoke bluntly and forcefully. For example: "I would rather roll naked in broken glass than sell [Hollywood] these stories." (Come on Sue -- tell us how you really feel.) She went on to explain that, having spent 15 years as a Hollywood scriptwriter, she wanted nothing more to do with that world. "I am not a team player. I am not a good sport." 

Grafton comes by her trade honestly -- her father, C.W. (Cornelius Warren) Grafton wrote detective novels in the 1940s and 50s. His books are out of print, but he may have inspired her practice of catchy serial titles. Borrowing from the folk tale of The Old Woman and Her Pig, "Chip" Grafton named his first two books The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher. According to Wikipedia, "a partial manuscript of a third novel, The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox, is known to exist.")

Tongue firmly in cheek, Grafton spoke about the many trials of the writing life, her many hours of therapy, and ultimately her decision to get a life and slow down the pace.

Grafton credited Jungian therapy ("very intellectual and abstract -- not 'boo-hoo' therapy") with teaching her that everyone has inside them both the person that they want to be and a repressed, "shadow side." Her fiction, she said, is her way of giving voice to that dark, repressed side.

Her assertion that the things we most despise are a part of each and every one of us and that we all should own these pieces of ourselves rather than deny them drew noises of both protest and agreement from the audience. A librarian sitting near me whispered, "That's why I read mystery fiction -- to feed my shadow side."

"Kinsey Millhone is my shadow," said Grafton, "and realizing that has changed the way I work." "Everything is process," she said. "I need to learn to trust the process."

It wasn't entirely clear that Grafton is always able to heed her own advice, but her self-deprecating observations frequently had the audience howling with laughter. At various points in the evening, many folks were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their cheeks -- the mark, clearly, of a writer who connects with her audience.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta