Recent posts about Authors & Books on Typepad

'Some writers have the gift of simply letting you know you can trust them, Mark Oakley has this gift in abundance...' Rowan Williams Mark Oakley winged his way onto my radar via Bel Mooney. Having shared my enthusiasm for Brian... Read more

Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive is a chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into... Read more

Yesterday I climbed the stairs and took the “L” to 1965 where I was stuck in the heart of downtown Chicago waiting for my grandmother to finish her shift in the coat department at Three Sisters so she could treat... Read more

Hello, librarian friends. We hope you had a great 4th of July weekend. If you're looking for more (book-related) fireworks, then be sure to join us for our virtual book buzz this Thursday, July 9th, from 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT.... Read more

Have you all had the phone call... The one we’ve all been waiting for, at least here in the UK... Did you trip over on the way to pick up the phone because you couldn’t see where you were going...... Read more

We date the “classic” noir period from 1941's The Maltese Falcon (or even Orson Welles' 1940 Citizen Kane, itself a mystery about Fate) to the 1959 Welles tour-de-force Touch of Evil. But noir wasn't noir until the French got hold... Read more

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated... Read more

I’d put it off and put if off but to no avail, I’ve had to sit down and make some masks. The Kayaker had sent me patterns and must have been on his tenth request for a mask, made with... Read more

Thatcher's Spy: My Life as an MI5 agent inside Sinn Féin, by Willie Carlin. Merrion Press, 2019. Amazon/Bookshop/Hive This autobiography of Willie Carlin, a former British intelligence agent inside Sinn Fein, garnered significant press attention on publication last year. That's... Read more

Romance is in the air on The Library Love Fest Podcast! This week, we featured a conversation between librarian Stephanie Anderson and author Sarah MacLean. Stephanie Anderson is Assistant Director, Selection, at BookOps, managing the fantastic team responsible for selecting... Read more