News & Notes – 9/24/16

News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff

Book News

• Banned Books Week starts tomorrow! 
• Khizanat al-Qarawiyyin, the oldest library in the world, set to re-open after multimillion-pound restoration.  The library is in Fez, in Morocco. (The National)
• Amazon to open a bookstore in the Boston metropolitan area. Amazon already has two brick-and-mortar stores, one in Seattle and one in San Diego, and plans to open stores in Portland (OR) and Chicago. (Shelf Awareness)
• James Patterson calls off his fictional “Murder of Stephen King”. Yeah, someone should have told him that was a bad idea…  (The Guardian)

Worth Reading

• Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty (John Mullan, in The Guardian)
• Reading the last chapter at Detroit’s oldest bookstore (Detroit Free Press)

For Writers & Bloggers

• Thoughts from a Blogger Girl–How I Blog! Anna over at Herding Cats & Burning Soup explains how she stays organized as a blogger. Bonus: cat pictures!
• Fall 2016 Bloggiesta Mini Challenge: Bullet Journaling for Book Bloggers (Andrea at The Overstuffed Bookcase)
• Masquerade Crew is looking for “killer posts about writing or reading”  (Masquerade Crew)

Literary Losses

Edward Albee, the world-famous playwright best known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, died Friday, Sept. 16, 2016 at the age of 88. Albee had a long and illustrious career as a playwright, beginning with The Zoo Story in 1958 and ending with Me Myself and I in 2007. Along the way, he adapted Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Nabokov’s Lolita for the stage, and garnered numerous awards, including several Tony Awards, three Pulitzer Prizes, and a host of other drama award. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won the Tony Award in 1963, and would have won the Pulitzer Prize for drama if the advisory committee had not decided against awarding a drama prize at all that year (over the objections of the drama jury.) The play later became de regueur reading for theater students. (Obituaries, biographies, and tributes: American Theater, The Guardian, New York Times, Wikipedia.)

W. P. Kinsella died on Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, in Hope, British Columbia. His best-known work is Shoeless Joe, the story of a farmer who builds a baseball field in hopes of seeing the ghost of his idol, Shoeless Joe Jackson. The book was later adapted as the spectacularly successful movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner.  Kinsella’s literary agent, Carolyn Swayze, said in a statement that his death was doctor-assisted. (Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in Canada.) Willie Steele, a biographer working on a book about Kinsella, noted that he had suffered from complications of diabetes in recent years. (Obituaries & biography: Los Angeles Times; NPR; Toronto Star; Wikipedia)

Book & Movie Announcements

• New Winnie-the-Pooh Book to Introduce Penguin Character based on a photo of Milne’s son Christopher playing with Pooh and a toy penguin. The four stories in the book will each be written by a different author. (GalleyCat)
• Hulu set to develop Throne of Glass series for television, along with the Mark Gordon Co. (Deadline)
• Mary Stewart’s forgotten novella is the perfect celebration of her centenary year (Allison Flood, for The Guardian) Hodder & Stoughton are republishing The Wind off the Small Isles—but alas, only in the UK as far as I can tell. However, US readers can order it from Book Depository.

Awesome Lists

• In honor of Bilbo and Frodo’s birthdays (Sept. 22), here are The 37 Best Lines from The Hobbit and The 23 Best Lines from The Lord of the Rings. (BookRiot)

Bookish Quote

There’s A Million Things I Haven’t Read — 8 x12 poster designed by Christine Riccio of PolandbananasBooks. $9 (US)

That’s it for this week!

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