Tuesday 22 August 2000
§ Los Angeles Times
- Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine is being re-staged in Burbank. Bradbury is 80 years old today, Tuesday. Celebrants at his birthday party Saturday night included Norman Corwin and Charlton Heston.
- Here's a profile of Jim Dale, reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks. Fun fact: Dale wrote the lyrics to the song ''Georgy Girl'' back in the '60s.
§ Time August 28, 2000
A profile of R.L. Stine, who has plans to lure readers back from Harry Potter.
§ Salon Aug. 17, 2000
A profile of Lemony Snicket, author of the children's books ''A Series of Unfortunate Events'', now up to volume 5.
Friday 18 August 2000
§ USA Today 15 August 2000
Pseudonymous author Elizabeth Haydon is donating all royalties from the second book, Prophecy, of her trilogy-in-progress to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation; and numerous celebrities, from David Cassidy and Dolly Parton and Danny DeVito, to Orson Scott Card and Harlan Ellison and Robert Jordan and Tom Doherty, helped out at the book's launch party. You can hear snippets of the celebrity readings, and enter trivia contests for an assortment of prizes, at www.dailymysteryguest.com, until the end of August.
Nature 29 June 2000
Joan Slonczewski's "Tuberculosis bacteria join UN" details reactions from member nations to the first microorganism to join the United Nations.
What no one anticipated was that the [cybernetically] enhanced [tuberculosis] bacteria, like so many macroscale robotic entities of the last century, would develop self-awareness and discover a true brotherly love of their human hosts. "Let's face it", says a TB spokesclone, "we never really wanted to kill humans anyway. Our ancestors inhabited humans peacefully most of the time, for hundreds of generations. Occasionally we messed up and trashed our environment - but how many human nations haven't?"
(Article is online but costs $7 to non-subscribers. Thanks to Cliff Barnes for the reference.)
Sunday 13 August 2000
§ New York Times Magazine August 13, 2000
An article by Stephen J. Dubner asks What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?, considering the bestselling author's recent publishing experiments, his forthcoming nonfiction book On Writing (Scribner, October), and the aftermath of his near-fatal accident last year.
§ New York Times August 12, 2000
An essay by Alan Cowell examines the Harry Potter backlash: though ''By and large the initial reception has been overwhelmingly favorable'', nevertheless
''proponents of a minority countervision are prepared to take up the cudgels against the prevailing view of the Potter story, even to brave the accusation that nothing breeds resentment quite like success.''
§ Washington Post August 10, 2000
An article by Laura Sessions Stepp finds the depiction of adolescent life in the Harry Potter books to be just right.
§ Boston Globe August 13, 2000
A review of Rebecca Goldstein's Properties of Light (Houghton Mifflin), a novel that ''could be called a work of science fiction: The science is physics, the fiction is about passion -- intellectual, familial, erotic.''
§ San Francisco Chronicle August 13, 2000
Martin Rubin reviews Doris Lessing's Ben, in the World (HarperCollins), a sequel to The Fifth Child, about a monster born to a middle-class family. Rubin comments that Lessing's career has ''rang[ed] from science fiction to realism. In this latest novel, she manages again to bridge the divide between those two modes of fiction. Is it too much to hope that this year at last the Swedish Academy will recognize her unique place in the literary landscape of the world and award her the Nobel Prize? It is long overdue.''
§ January
Recently in the online magazine:
- A review by Claude Lalumière of Ron Goulart's Comic Book Culture
- Yet another positive review, by Linda Richards, of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
- A review by Bruce Byfield of Billy Dee Williams and Rob MacGregor's Justin/Time (sequel to Psi/Net)
- An interview with Buzz Aldrin, recent co-author with John Barnes of The Return
§ Village Voice July 5 - 11, 2000
A review by Carol Cooper (half-way down the page) of Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood.
Monday 7 August 2000
§ New York Times Book Review August 7, 2000
Today's daily NYT review is a longer look at Peter Straub's Magic Terror: 7 Tales (Random House), by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who finds Straub's results mixed... at least when compared with ''the greatest of ghost stories'' by Oliver Onions and Conrad Aiken.
§ Publishers Weekly 7/31/00
Small Presses Stand Out at Horror Confab is PW's look at the World Horror Convention, held last May in Denver, though the article by Dorman T. Shindler contains a few errors, among them identifying Ellen Datlow as ''an editor at St. Martin's''. (Paula Guran's DarkEcho Newsletter for August 3 mentions others.)
Sunday 6 August 2000
§ New York Times Book Review August 6, 2000
Bill Kent briefly reviews Peter Straub's Magic Terror: 7 Tales (Random House): ''The magic in Peter Straub's third collection is his revelation of human character as a source of both evil and innocence.''
§ Washington Post Book World August 6, 2000
An article by Nadine Epstein about Harry Potter's precursors includes books by Jane Yolen and Susan Cooper.
Also, a brief review by Jabari Asim of the new unauthorized biography of J.K. Rowling, which, ''while clocking in at 105 pages, is much slimmer than it sounds''.
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