Archive for May 2006

What’s inside Cuppa Joad?

Welcome, book lovers!
Cuppa Joad is the project of a few Alibris staff members. We created this blog in order to share with you the books we’re reading, as well as the literature and the authors we love. Most important, we hope you’ll find Cuppa Joad to be a place—much like a comfortable corner bookstore—where book […]

Orange Prize shortlists literary ladies

If you are a fan of Brit lit, female authors, or both, you’ll probably find reads aplenty in recently announced shortlists for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Orange Award for New Writers. These book awards go to women who write in English and whose novels were first published in the United Kingdom. The […]

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

As lauded as she continues to be, Zadie Smith hasn’t yet received all of the credit she deserves for the creation of On Beauty. To read the critics, Smith’s tribute to E.M. Forster’s Howards End is “an extraordinary academic comic novel” (Salon) about “the divisive cultural politics of the new century” (The New York […]

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo

When Kate DiCamillo publishes a new children’s book, it’s an event. One of those authors who are hugely successful while still being hugely deserving, DiCamillo is beloved among towheaded tykes, gray-haired types, and many of us in between. It’s the kids, of course, who are the intended beneficiaries of her big-sky imagination, but there’s much […]

Jennifer Weiner is jealous

“What’s a girl have to do to get plagiarized in this town?” asked chick-lit favorite author Jennifer Weiner via her Web site as she headed off on book tour for Goodnight Nobody.
The New York Times reported this week that Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan had ripped passages from not just one but three authors as she […]

Pulitzer winner Geraldine Brooks on writing

How would you like to glimpse inside the mind of a remarkable author?
Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a couple weeks ago for March—her sublime imagining of the early life and Civil War days of Mr. March, the long-absent father character in Louisa May Alcott’s classic and revered Little Women. Just a couple […]

Black Swan Green makes Book Sense for me

The May 2006 Book Sense Picks list is out and (as is usual) the recommended reads are a delightful mix of authors and titles, both familiar and obscure. Poring over the list is one of my favorite beginning-of-month pastimes. The recommendations from independent booksellers around the country are just eclectic enough to keep me feeling […]

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Let’s see, I’ve recently reviewed something suspenseful, something mysterious, and something literary. Now it’s time to get a little adolescent. Fortunately, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is suspenseful, mysterious, and literary the entire time it’s also masquerading as teen reading. In fact, this series is a masterpiece and three of the most marvelous books […]