![]() 9780399546686.īUYING ADVISORY: EL (K-3), EL - ADVISABLEįrank loves elephants and is thrilled when he hears that the local park in Alabama where he lives could be getting one. Meet Miss Fancy by Irene Latham, illustrated by John Holyfield. The book is a good example-in my humble opinion-of an author showing instead of telling. The fact that this is based on a real elephant and keepers. Which brings me to the second thing I love: the writing or the narrative. I love their hosepipe trunks and their flap-flap ears. ![]() First I just have to say that I love, love, love Frank. But where there's a will, is there a way? Frank, our fictional hero, is not allowed in the park nor allowed to visit Miss Fancy. Birmingham, Alabama, as adult readers will no doubt know was segregated at that time-only whites were allowed. ![]() Miss Fancy lived in her new home from 1913 to 1934. There was an elephant, Miss Fancy, whom schoolchildren helped to purchase from a circus for Avondale Park. Premise/plot: This picture book is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1913. But not once, not ever, had Frank seen a real elephant. He loved their hosepipe trunks and their flap-flap ears, their tree-stump feet and their swish-swish tails. He loved drawing elephants and talking about elephants. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900. The poem narrates the execution of Wooldridge. ![]() Wilde spent mid-1897 with Robert Ross in Berneval-le-Grand, where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen. During his imprisonment, a hanging took place.Ĭharles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile either in Berneval-le-Grand or in Dieppe, France, after his release from Reading Gaol in 1897. Although I like to think of this poem as more of a story but that is just my persepective. The poem is titled “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” And boy is it a long poem. This week I have picked number 16 from the top 100 Irish poems list. ![]() ![]() ![]() Frances, whose best friend Bobbi is also her former girlfriend, falls for Nick, an older, married actor. The plot of Conversations is essentially a rather more crowded version of the classic “girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy” story (Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times). But Conversations is a novel nonetheless, and novels, as Rooney goes on to point out, depart from life not least in having plots. ![]() However the similarities between Rooney’s own life and that of Frances, the heroine of her debut novel Conversations with Friends, are impossible to miss.įrances, Conversations’ twenty-one-year-old fledgling-author narrator, ‘moves in all the same social circles’ as Rooney, is studying for the same degree that Rooney pursued at Trinity College, Dublin, and ‘has some of the same cultural position ’ ( The Tangerine). Sally Rooney is not, as she observed in an interview with the Belfast-based magazine The Tangerine, a writer of ‘autofiction’. ![]() ![]() ![]() We can’t believe it has been ten years since we embarked on this journey together - surely none of us look old enough, but clearly time flies when you’re having fun. It has been our absolute pleasure to work with Richard and Judy since 2010, creating an inclusive and revered book club that has been a platform for so many novelists who have gone on to become bestsellers and award-winners. From a razor-sharp thriller by a debut author who’s found a new way to surprise us, to a remarkable piece of historical fiction from an established author Richard and Judy have made it their mission to choose books that felt special and exciting to them, and that’s what has made this book club so unique and accessible for all. ![]() ![]() With books hand-picked by our favourite book-loving couple from their own reading piles, the Richard and Judy Book Club has always had a unique ability to uncover stories that have an enormous impact on readers. ![]() In celebration of the 10th Anniversary of The Richard and Judy Book Club with WHSmith, the pair behind a decade of outstanding recommendations have selected some of their favourite, stand-out titles from the past decade. ![]() ![]() ![]() In addition to songs she wrote (such as “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”), Ritchie took special delight in preserving, performing, and passing down traditional ballads and other old-time songs. Many Americans know Jean Ritchie from her singing and songwriting career. Perhaps more than any other performer of her generation, Jean Ritchie gives us the traditional old-time stories and songs and the story of the lived experience of growing up in a family in the Cumberland Mountains of Eastern Kentucky. If you’re looking for bona fide old-time mountain music – the real deal, before bluegrass, before the Carter Family even – then look no further than Jean Ritchie. This week on StoryWeb: Jean Ritchie’s book Singing Family of the Cumberlands. ![]() ![]() The characters are all cute in the Hello Kitty and Pikachu/Pokémon tradition. The manga starts off with a few stories in color and then the rest in black and white. The graphic novel includes a guide to all of the characters and some of the magical objects they run across at the front of the volume. There is also, unfortunately, a not-so-nice cloud named Cavity who tries to trick the puppies from time to time. He also discovers that he loves freshly baked cinnammon rolls. He lands in Café Cinnamon, where he makes friend with puppies Mocha, Cappuccino, Espresso, Milk, and Chiffon and a unicorn named Cornet. But Fluffy yearns to go down to Earth, to leave the clouds and find other creatures more like him. ![]() Through a series of stories readers are introduced to him and watch him learn to fly with the help of his bunny-like ears. ![]() Fluffy is a little puppy with a tail that looks like a cinnamon roll, who was born in the clouds. ![]() ![]() Swift is unflinching about the catastrophe on the ground, but careful not to belittle the beliefs of those at the heart of the calamity. His new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, is part regional history, part crabber ride-along, part disaster narrative in slow motion.Īt its best, Chesapeake Requiem is a meditation on belief and disbelief in an America shouting about fake news. ![]() ![]() Earl Swift, an author of six previous books and a former correspondent for The Virginian-Pilot, immersed himself for the better part of two years with the 481 inhabitants of Tangier. In recent years, they’ve garnered some media attention for the paradox of largely rejecting sea-level rise while simultaneously suffering its wrath. Tiny, waterlogged Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia in Chesapeake Bay, is full of people of faith. If you live on an island in the middle of 18 trillion gallons of warming, expanding water, you’re eventually going to sink no matter what you believe. Either way, if you step off a cliff, you will most certainly fall. ![]() ![]() “The good thing about science,” Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, “is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Your stance on gravity is irrelevant. This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. ![]() ![]() ![]() Starting in Hartford, where he worked as a management analyst for the Connecticut State Budget Bureau., Falk was no more successful than at an earlier attempt to. ![]() In Just One More Thing Peter Falk, award-winning actor takes us behind-the-scenes into his professional and private life. In recent years, he had been treated for dementia and Alzheimer's disease. 22.50 Other new, used and collectible from 18.29. In addition to being twice nominated for an Academy Award, Falk won five Emmys and a Golden Globe. Even the guys on the other team were rolling in the grass." Later, Falk used his signature squint as part of nearly every eccentric character he played, including Columbo, the quirky detective who was always seen wearing a rumpled raincoat and smoking stumpy cigars. In front of everyone, I whipped out my eye and handed it to the umpire: 'You'll do better with this one.' Talk about getting a laugh. They sat so close to the field, they could see and hear everything. ![]() I knew it and everybody in the stands knew it. Once while playing baseball in high school, Falk was called out at third base. In his autobiography, Falk recounted how, as a teenager, he used his glass eye to get laughs. He used a prosthetic eye for the rest of his life-always to his advantage. ![]() Within two days, his tumor was removed along with his right eye. Young Peter received a diagnosis of retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer that must be treated quickly because it develops rapidly. When he was 3 years old, his preschool teacher noticed he cocked his head in an unusual way whenever he looked at something, so she recommended he see a doctor. Best known for his television persona Columbo, Falk was also an eight-decade cancer survivor. You've probably heard that actor Peter Falk died last week at age 83. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Because you get tabloid baggage wherever you go. Is there any sense of relief when it comes to promoting her books abroad, without that added baggage? “Well, no,” Lawson sighs. ![]() “Although my poor neighbor opposite did need to plow her way through quite a lot during recipe testing.” A note to Lawson’s neighbor: If you’re planning a holiday anytime soon, I volunteer to house sit. “I’ve always been someone who’s cooked for myself, but cooking for myself exclusively is a very new experience, and one I’ve really warmed to, actually,” Lawson says. If anything, I felt that more people came around to it over the past year.”Įven when writing recipes for one, Lawson’s unique balance of warm, lyrical meditations on her endless love for food-alongside tried-and-tested recipes, of course-continues unabated throughout her new book. “Both the title and the project of Cook, Eat, Repeat predate the pandemic, and I had no idea that would become such a pattern. “All my books have been about where I am in my life, because I don’t see how else one writes,” she says. (Remember when that string of words started to feel less like a daily ritual, and more like a primal scream?) Lawson first began plotting the book many months before the pandemic hit, though, and she remembers its origins a little differently. The title of Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, is enough to transport even the most beleaguered of home cooks straight back to the early months of lockdown. ![]() ![]() ![]() She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She reads the work of the very best writers-Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov-and discovers why their work has endured. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. ![]() |