everything book-related that catches my eye. mostly about books and writers I have read that interest me.
my goodreads
come on up to the house: An LA Chicana opens book store in a NYC barrio →
Aurora Anaya-Cerda (Photo/Johnny Ramos)Aurora Anaya-Cerda, 34, has had a passion for books since she was a little girl growing up in East Los Angeles. This Friday, her dream of the past six years is coming true. She will be opening her very own book…
So jealz! I hope it does/continues to do well!
White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way … they were right… . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place… . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread … until it invaded the whites who had made it… . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Still my favorite passage…in life. Still my favorite book of all time!
(via theangryblackwoman)
(via vesivett)
The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel by an African American author Toni Morrison.
Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful as beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigold in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom. Pecola’s life does change—in painful, devastating ways. With its vivid evocation of the feat and loneliness at the heart of a child’s yearning, and the tragedy of it’s fulfillment, The Bluest Eye remains on of Toni Morrison’s most powerful, unforgettable novels—and a significant work of American fiction.
Art Nouveau Book Covers.
Anil’s Ghost (2000) is a novel written by a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje.
Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past — a story propelled by a riveting mystery.
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka on 12 September 1943. He moved to England in 1954, and in 1962 moved to Canada where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the University of Toronto and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971.
He published a volume of memoir, entitled Running in the Family, in 1983. His collections of poetry include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981), which won the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1971; The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998).
His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient (1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. Anil’s Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells the story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes for an international human rights group.
Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his wife, Linda Spalding, with whom he edits the literary journal Brick. His latest novels are Divisadero(2007) and The Cat’s Cradle (2011).
The fifth issue of Matchbook Magazine is live live live! And let me say - it is beautiful. (Photo by Jenna Alcala).
(via simplytess)
House Made of Dawn (1968) is a novel by a Native American author N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
A young Native American, Abel has come home from a foreign war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world — modern, industrial America — pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, claiming his soul, goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust. And the young man, torn in two, descends into hell.
