The Ultimate Book Club
April 7, 2011 In March, the NPR book club read Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, and today Verghese answers questions posted by the audience on the NPR Books Facebook page.
News & Notes
A Griffin for Mattawa?
April 5, 2011 Khaled Mattawa is an international finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry announced today. The other three international finalists are Seamus Heaney, Philip Mosley, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. The Griffin Prize is one of the most lucrative awards in poetry: each of the finalists will receive an honorarium of 10,000 dollars; the winner, who will be announced on June 1 in Toronto, will receive 65,000 dollars.
Manhunt
April 4, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. died on April 4, 1968, when a single shot fired from a flophouse across the street felled him as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Writer Hampton Sides was six years old when King was murdered, a story he tells in his recent book of narrative nonfiction, Hellhound on His Trail.
Keeping Alive the Notion of Song
March 30, 2011 When Dolen Perkins-Valdez was young woman, she had no use for the real housewives of Memphis, Tennessee. In a new essay for Black voices, she writes, “When I was younger, in moments of my most impertinent, most naive arrogance, I wondered why my extraordinarily intelligent mother decided to become a housewife. Why didn’t she do more with her great gifts? It was Alice Walker’s groundbreaking 1974 essay ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’ that matured me on this subject.
Transfusion Terror
March 29, 2011 According to an interview in The Atlantic, Holly Tucker got the idea for her new book of nonfiction, Blood Work, when she heard then-President George W. Bush defend his position on stem-cell research by citing a fear of any scientific studies that might result in “human-animal hybrids”:
After that speech, I was struck, dumbfounded actually, how the arguments and reactions on the Internet and in the media mirrored those that I was seeing in the early blood transfusion trials, where the donors were animals.
The Novelist and the Nun
March 25, 2011 Ann Patchett spent twelve years as a student at St. Bernard Academy, a Catholic school in Nashville run by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Mercy. (The school now ends after 8th grade, but during Patchett’s youth, the St. Bernard campus housed an all-girls high school, as well). One of the nuns there is the subject of Patchett’s new essay in the British journal Granta. The piece is not available online, but Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan describes it as “a moving essay …
