Nominated for six Oscars, including best actress for the young unknown Gabourey Sidibe, it also featured excellent performances from musician Mo'Nique, who won an Oscar as the abuse-colluding mother, and Mariah Carey as a social worker, prompting the classic line from Precious, "I mean, what are you? Are you Italian? Are you some kind of black?" But in 2009 the film adaptation, Precious, promoted heavily by Oprah Winfrey, catapaulted it into the mainstream. The book owed its initial success to its use by social workers, abuse survivors' groups and psychologists treating victims of rape and incest. When her debut novel Push came out 15 years ago, readers were enthralled and appalled by protagonist Precious Jones, the New York girl who was abused by her father and failed by the system – only to fight back, educate herself and transcend her background.
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Not the sex scenes, actually, but the scenes that lead up to the sex scenes-the caress, the touch, the shiver of expectation, the kiss. He has so many sides-by turns sexy and courageous or funny and meddling. I guess the character I’ve gotten to know best is Jack Sheridan, who has appeared in every Virgin River novel. That’s a little like asking a mother who her favorite child is. Who is your favorite character you’ve ever written? It could be something in the water, but whatever you need, chances are you’ll find it in Virgin River. It’s removed from the world in a way and exists as a place of community and caring, a kind of magical town where people help each other, can trust each other, and commitment is the order of the day. What is it about Virgin River that makes it such a hotbed for romance? The hardest question in the world-Angie LaCroix and Patrick Riordan retire to Virgin River for a respite from their traumas and find that love and passion does as much to heal wounds as a vacation could. We chatted with Carr about sexy scenes, great books and the upcoming holiday season. Our December 2012 Top Pick in Romance is a tale of an inescapable connection from “an author deft at mining deep emotion.” Robyn Carr takes her readers to Virgin River at Christmastime in My Kind of Christmas, a hopeful tale of a rugged Navy man and the woman he loves. His books have been shortlisted for over forty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (seven times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). Other notable award winning books include Floodland, Marcus’ first novel, which won the Branford-Boase Award in 2001, a prize for the best debut novel for children published in the UK each year My Swordhand is Singing, which won the Booktrust Teenage Prize for 2007, and Lunatics and Luck, part of The Raven Mysteries series, which won a Blue Peter Book Award in 2011. Marcus has also received two Printz Honors, for Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016, giving him the most citations to date for America’s most prestigious book prize for writing for young adults. Printz Award for his novel Midwinterblood. He is the winner of many prizes, most notably the 2014 Michael L. MARCUS SEDGWICK was born and raised in East Kent in the south-east of England. 'We poets in our youth begin in gladness,' said Wordsworth, 'But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.' Consider Franz Kafka's story, 'A Fasting-Artist.' The fasting-artist is an artist dedicated completely to his art. Therefore the artistic vocation has an aura of tragedy and doom about it. “But among the elect, martyrdom is always a possibility and to be an artist is not altogether a choice - the God of Art picks you, not the other way around. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards.” Poets know this too they too travel the dark roads. Going into a narrative - into the narrative process - is a dark road. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Where is the story? The story is in the dark. Or it feels like a stone by the sixth draft,' they added. 'You go, you get the story, you're whacked out, you come back and write it all down on a stone. 'Yeah, that's what it is,' said the writers. Then he's really, really tired, and then he writes the whole thing down on a stone.' So the only thing he really brings back with him is a couple of stories. 'He wants the secret of life and death, he goes through hell, he comes back, but he hasn't got immortality, all he's got is two stories - the one about his trip, and the other, extra one about the flood. 'Gilgamesh was the first writer,' I said. “I was holding forth about this a while ago at a dinner for a bunch of writers. – There were a lot of POVs, not all of which seemed necessary. But I’m guessing this is just Anne Rice’s style. The characters really like to wax lyrical and over-explain things. And in every book so far, at least one character has explained their entire life story out loud to someone else. He even explained how he was going to jump to other characters’ perspectives (though that made more sense when I got to the end). For example, the book started off with Lestat breaking the fourth wall, explaining how he was going to tell us the story of what happened since the ending of the last book. – A lot of the writing choices in this series are strange. Things I Disliked/Things I Didn’t Mind but Others Might Dislike: I can’t help it! I have so many thoughts! I’m trying to at least divide these up as much as possible so that you all can choose which sections interest you and just read those if you don’t want to read the whole thing □ So, my review is once again… really long. New Zealand's last major earthquake was a magnitude 7.8 in South Island's Fiordland region on Ja temblor that moved the southern tip of the country 12 inches closer to Australia, seismologist Ken Gledhill said at the time. "Thank God for earthquake strengthening 10 years ago," Anglican Dean of Christchurch, Rev. Though chimneys and some older facades came down, the structures are well built," said Savage, a professor at the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University in the capital, Wellington. "It's about the same size (quake) as Haiti, but the damage is so much less. (that) mean the buildings are strong compared with, say, Haiti," which suffered widespread damage in a magnitude-7.0 quake this year, earth sciences professor Martha Savage told The Associated Press. "New Zealand has very good building codes. (AP Photo/NZPA, David Alexander) ** NEW ZEALAND OUT ** David Alexander / NZPA A powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck much of New Zealand's South Island early Saturday and caused widespread damage, but there were just two reports of serious injuries. People inspect a crack caused in the South Brighton Bridge approach in Christchurch, New Zealand, Saturday, Sept. Experts said the low number of injuries in the powerful quake reflects the country's strict building codes. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” - Vogueįrom one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” - Entertainment Weekly Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon ,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible Tokarczuk never gets too close to the character of Jacob, instead presenting him through the eyes of his contemporaries, both ardent believers and staunch skeptics. The movement espoused “redemption through sin”: fast days became feasts, and rules on modesty, purity, and even incest were overturned. Jacob Frank, as he would come to be known, was a real man who inspired legions of followers into “Frankism,” a Sabbatean Jewish movement that held, at its core, the belief that people should transgress every moral boundary they know. Whether Jakub Lejbowicz Frank is a true mystic or a fraud is not clear, neither in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s long-anticipated The Books of Jacob nor in the history books. Rumors of a young and charismatic Jew, said by some to be the Messiah, reach the region’s townspeople through long chains of scholars and merchants along the trade routes from Smyrna (Izmir) on the Mediterranean coast to the settlements on the North Sea. THE YEAR IS 1752 (the page, 900-or-so), and a carriage is barreling through misty Podolia, a historic region that now sits on Ukraine’s eastern border. Coen brothers fans will recognize this device from The Big Lebowski, where it heightens the absurdity of the hero’s situation rather than his humanity, as it does here. Once in a while you get a story in which a regular guy (or gal) gets drawn into a mess and has to untangle it and save the day, which is what happens here. There are other options: I’m partial to the amateur sleuth, even though that device has more or less gone out of fashion or you can tell the story from the point of view of the criminal, but that takes away the most obvious locus for suspense since we already know whodunit. The easiest route is to make him or her a cop or a private investigator. One of the eternal problems of the detective story is how to account for your protagonist’s involvement in whatever shady dealings are about to unfold. Easy gets a job offer from a shady character (Tom Sizemore) that’s too good to pass up, even though he knows it’s trouble. It pays loving homage to its predecessors but doesn’t feel derivative or tired.ĭenzel Washington plays Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a recent WWII vet who finds himself out of work and with a mortgage to pay. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) is a great example of a genre I’m already a sucker for: detective stories. An excellent audiobook version is narrated by British actor Michael York. The book was adapted for a movie in 1988 and again for the blockbuster 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The main characters are clear role models who valiantly help save Narnia from the Witch even the one who initially falls under her sway learns his lesson, showing the power of repentance and forgiveness. Creepy, evil creatures are also described their leader is the White Witch, who is cruel and shows no mercy. Expect several violent scenes, including a large battle (axes, clubs, and more are used, and characters are injured and die) and - spoiler alert! - the tense, scary, sad death of a major character. Lewis, a devout Christian, weaves lots of Christian allegory into the book (and the series as a whole), but the story can be enjoyed on many levels, by all kinds of readers. Lewis' classic Chronicles of Narnia series, which children have loved for generations. Aided by the wise and magnificent lion Aslan, the children lead Narnia into a spectacular climactic battle to be free of the Witch’s glacial powers forever It is rated PG and stars Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, and James McAvoy, with Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan. Parents need to know that the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book published in C.S. |