Reading Roundup, 24 April, 2009
The New York Times reports on the finalists for this year’s Orange Prize, which include American books Home, by Marilyn Robinson, Scotsboro, by Ellen Feldman, and The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt.
The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded this week. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House); for drama, Ruined, by Lynn Nottage; for history, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company); for biography, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham (Random House); for poetry, The Shadow of Sirius, by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press); and for general nonfiction, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon (Boosey & Hawkes).
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating review of Finding Oz, by Evan I Schwartz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The book examines what influenced L. Frank Baum to write the Oz stories. Enter a feminist mother-in-law, theosophy, the bricked streets of Peekskill, N.Y., and a dead niece named Dorothy. It’s fun to consider what inspired a world that has become part of our cultural consciousness.
The Daily Beast’s Book Beast has a lovely interview with Ruth Reichl about her new memoir, Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way (Penguin Press). Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine, compassionately describes the ways in which her mother’s intelligence and ambition were thwarted by the expectations of her era. Perhaps a good one to put on the Mother’s Day list.