August 2011
32 posts
Meeting the Challenge of Augie
Tomorrow is the first of September, the official start date for all things Augie, our 10th anniversary book selection.
This fall’s celebration of a great work of literature is not only bigger, it is huge. It’s our anniversary, folks, and we are determined to not only think outside the box but to break the box. Starting, one might say, with the book itself.
The Adventures of Augie...
One Book, Many Interpretations
Last Friday evening, the Chicago Public Library hosted an opening reception and awards presentation for a thrilling new show, One Book, Many Interpretations, Second Edition at the Harold Washington Library Center, Special Collections Exhibit Hall.
Curated by Lesa Dowd of our Special Collections and Preservation Division, this juried exhibition commemorates the 10th anniversary of One Book, One...
WatchWe were on the morning news recently talking up The Adventures of Augie March!
Thanks to the nearly one thousand library patrons who have already checked a copy of the book out of their Chicago Public Library!
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Coming Up The House on Mango Street
The common thread running through the vignettes that make up The House on Mango Street is one of a search for identity. Through each of the poetic episodes we see Esperanza searching for the kind of girl, and eventually the kind of woman, she wants to be. It’s a common theme in coming of age stories and Cisneros ably tackles it with her insightful and lyrical prose. For more books that deal with...
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The Elusive Harper Lee
Harper Lee, the legendary author of To Kill a Mockingbird (our inaugural One Book, One Chicago selection a decade ago), is not what you might call “high profile.” One doubts very seriously that she will ever become a Twitter personality. Unlike, say, Scott Westerfeld, John Green or Neil Gaiman,whose frequent tweets and meticulously kept online personae help to inform readers’ interpretations and...
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Themes abound in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In a conversation with our own Commissioner Mary Dempsey, Steppenwolf Theater’s Artistic Director Martha Lavey discussed the theme of personal convictions coming into conflict with societal norms and expectations. This question most clearly weighs on John Proctor, who struggles between his morality and his role in a closed society with rigorous ideas...
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"Self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm"
Of all the authors chosen to be part of One Book, One Chicago, no other can match Jane Austen in terms of the number of spin-offs, fan fiction, sequels, prequels and takeoffs that her books have inspired. Indeed, true Austen fans have no problem identifying themselves as “Janeites,” referring to “the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for ‘Jane’ and every detail relative to...
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My Antonia Throughout the Years
“No question, Miss Cather has written a book of singular beauty and simplicity, in which her power of giving the essence of a community is united with a beautiful capacity for character creation.”
So ends the review run on November 2, 1918 in the Chicago Tribune when My Antonia by Willa Cather was first published. Eighty-four years later, My Antonia was chosen to be the Fall 2002 One Book One...
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Interesting Facts about The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It also won the Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.
The 1998 TV movie “A Soldier’s Sweetheart,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, was based on the chapter “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” That section, in turn, has its roots in Apocalypse Now, which is based on Joseph Conrad’s...
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We announced our next and most ambitious book yesterday, but we’ll still be spending some time on the blog looking at the past decade of selections. Did you read Interpreter of Maladies with us in Fall 2006? Here’s more on that title.
Universal themes of longing, loneliness and barriers of communication are handled with a deft hand by Jhumpa Lahiri in her debut collection, perhaps most...
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Hello Augie
We have announced! This fall, we are thrilled to be diving into Saul Bellow’s magnum opus, what Martin Amis called the greatest American novel ever written—The Adventures of Augie March.
Join us for programs, discussions and more, and take a look at our fantastic guide to this great work of literature.
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Protecting the Mockingbirds from Harm
In To Kill a Mockingbird Atticus and Miss Maudie work together to make sure Scout knows that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because they are utterly harmless, living only to make music we enjoy. Boo Radley never harms a fly, and leaves treasures to share with Scout and her brother Jem. Tom Robinson is also an innocent. To injure Boo and Tom is just as wrong, then; they are mockingbirds. But,...
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Blondes and more, from The Long Goodbye
The Long Goodbye was our selection in Spring 2009. Of all of the authors we’ve celebrated, Raymond Chandler remains the most quotable, hands down. Here are a few of our favorites.
There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft...
Anonymous asked: List of OBOC from the start
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What is an Oxbow, anyway?
Did you know that one definition of an oxbow is a horseshoe shaped bend in a river?
The Art Institute of Chicago has a photograph of an oxbow taken by Terry Evans as part of their online collection: Solomon River Oxbow, Ottawa County, Kansas, August 2, 1990
Here is another example by Thomas Cole.
An Oxbow can also mean a bow shaped piece of wood forming a collar for a yoke of an ox....
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Memorable quotes from A Raisin in the Sun
A Raisin in the Sun was the fourth selection for One Book, One Chicago. (We’ll be announcing the 21st selection next week.)
MAMA My husband always said being any kind of a servant wasn’t a fit thing for a man to have to be. He always said a man’s hands was made to make things, or to turn the earth with – not to drive nobody’s car for ‘em – or – (She looks at her own hands) carry they slop...
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Love Letter to Chicago
Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago was our spring 2004 One Book, One Chicago selection. This collection of stories from a native Chicagoan made for a wonderful pick because it delved into one of the things that make our city so great – the richness of our neighborhoods. Stories like “Hot Ice,” “Chopin in Winter” and “Blight” were praised by critics and drew comparisons to the likes of Sherwood...
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Go Tell It On the Mountain -- Awards and Accolades...
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Go Tell It on the Mountain 39th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
It was listed among the hundred best works of twentieth-century English-language fiction named recently by the Random House-Modern Library panel.
Go Tell it on...
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The Language of One Day in the Life of Ivan...
Abraham Rothberg, author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels, acknowledged that in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn, “explored new terrain in the use of language, exploiting a combination of prison slang, peasant and pornographic slang.” Here is a selection of some of that language. These definitions and many more can be found using the online Oxford English...
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Elie Wiesel: "Bearing Witness" in Night
This photo was taken of an audience member sketching the author, at Elie Wiesel’s Chicago Public Library program in April 2002.
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, a small village in northern Transylvania, Romania. Only a teenager when he and his family were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, Weisel later dedicated his life to describing the horrors he witnessed there...
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A Big Year for Mango Street
Artwork created by Chicago teens inspired by The House on Mango Street
In the spring of 2009 The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros celebrated its 25th anniversary of publication. We chose to celebrate it by making it our 16th One Book, One Chicago selection. Comprised of vignettes, the book tells the coming-of-age story of Esperanza Cordero. In the fall of 2009 the book was also...
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What makes a Western a Western?
The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, is regarded by some to be the perfect example of a Western novel. But what is a Western, really?
Western literature explored the history and geography of the American West. Sometimes known as the Wild West or the Old West, the American West was largely populated by Native American Indians, cowboys, and pioneers. To the more settled American East,...
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Fun Facts about The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried, our the Fall 2003 selection, was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It also won the Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.
The 1998 TV movie “A Soldier’s Sweetheart,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, was based on the chapter “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” That section, in turn, has its roots in Apocalypse Now, which...
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Ziggar-what? Fun Facts about The Right Stuff
It is helpful to know what a ziggurat is when reading The Right Stuff, because Tom Wolfe frequently asserts that the pilots within are metaphorically climbing one. In case you don’t have a mental picture already, a ziggurat is sort of a stepped pyramid.
The film adaptation of The Right Stuff from 1983 is over three hours long… and worth every second. Not least because it features an appearance by...
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Interpreter Decoded
Our fall 2006 selection, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, made a big splash back in 1999 when it was first published. It was Lahiri’s debut and was so well received that it went on to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award as well as The New Yorker’s Best Debut of the Year award.
The book, a collection of stories, offers a glimpse of Indians and...
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What has Julia Alvarez been up to lately?
While we unfortunately do not have a recording of the conversation that Julia Alvarez had with Ana Castillo from her event at the Chicago Public Library on October 18, 2004 (when In the Time of the Butterflies was the One Book, One Chicago selection), Chicago Amplified has this recording in their archives from a few years later, of Alvarez reading from her work at the National Museum of Mexican...
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Jane Austen, 1775-1817
Little is known and even less can be verified about Jane Austen’s private life. What we do know is that she was born in Steventon, Hampshire on December 16, 1775 and grew up in a tight-knit family. Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children, with six brothers and one sister. She was very close to her sister Cassandra, and considered her to be her closest friend and companion. It is through...
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Fun Facts about The Long Goodbye
The main character of The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe, is the subject of some high-class fan fiction. In Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, 25 writers of mystery fiction, including Max Allan Collins, Sara Paretsky, and Loren Estleman, “present stories featuring Chandler’s introspective private eye and his Southern California milieu.”
Marlowe returns again and...
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To Kill a Mockingbird: Fun Facts
The word chiffarobe, mentioned frequently in To Kill a Mockingbird as the thing Mayella Ewell asks Tom Robinson to “bust up” in her yard, means “a piece of furniture incorporating a wardrobe and a chest of drawers,” and is pronounced “shif-uh-rohb,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary and Dictionary.com. The more common spelling is “chifforobe,”
Harper Lee became very close friends with...
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The Crucible: Fall 2007
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, our fall 2007 selection, is widely known due to numerous productions for the stage and two film adaptations. It was first performed on Broadway in 1953 and garnered mixed reviews. Miller himself was dissatisfied with the production. Still, it went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play. Chicago’s very own Steppenwolf Theater presented their production of The Crucible...
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Look Back at Spring 2003: A Raisin in the Sun
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was the Spring 2003 selection for One Book, One Chicago. Facts about playwright Lorraine Hansberry:
Hansberry grew up in a wealthy black family which frequently hosted prominent houseguests like Paul Robeson and Duke Ellington.
When Hansberry reached prominence herself, she rubbed shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Langston...
