News & Notes

November 15, 2010 Rebecca Skloot’s debut work of nonfiction has won the Wellcome Trust book prize for the best work of fiction or nonfiction with a medical theme. The award carries a prize of £25,000 (about $40,000).

November 5, 2010 In a long essay for The Huffington Post, Roy Blount Jr. considers this humble mollusk, a delectable morsel that is, for Blount, what madeleines were to Proust. “They make me think of my photographer friend, Slick Lawson, who lived in Nashville but hailed from Louisiana and loved New Orleans–maybe even more than I do, because he could stay up longer,” Blount writes.

November 4, 2010 Sad news from Knoxville today, as Carpe Librum Booksellers in the Bearden neighborhood announced it will close after this holiday season.

November 1, 2010 The British edition of Michael Sims‘s Dracula’s Guest is out now, and the Brits are pleased: “This selection of less familiar vampire stories is richly contextualised by Michael Sims’ introduction,” writes Jazz Jagger in The Financial Times. “A fine collection, by turns humorous, foul and ghastly.

October 27, 2010 Tonight, WBIR Channel 10, the NBC affiliate in Knoxville, airs a 30-minute special on the life and death of Henry Granju, 18-year-old son of popular Knoxville author and blogger Katie Allison Granju. Henry Granju was addicted to drugs, and died in May after suffering an overdose. The special airs commercial-free at 7:00 pm in East Tennessee, and herecan be viewed online as well.