After a drive to raise 1.25 million pounds, Cambridge University Library has taken delivery of the Siegried Sassoon papers.A while ago, there was a short...
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Christmas scoop for Cambridge University Library
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 | 11:30 AM
Poet wins short story award
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 | 11:11 AM
Again, the big names are edged out.Poet Kate Clanchy (44, pictured) has won the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award with only her second attempt at a...
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First novel wins John Llewellyn Rhys book prize
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 | 12:15 PM
Evie Wyld, 29, has edged out big names Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi to win the prestigious award.Her novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice,...
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You don't actually have to be a Booker winner to write bad sex, but it helps
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | 11:38 AM
Following the announcement of the winner of the 17th annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Tom Geoghegan asks in the BBC News Magazine whether sex in books...
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Instore chaos as Borders UK files for bankruptcy
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, November 30, 2009 | 11:12 AM
Borders UK filed for "administration" (the UK equivalent of bankruptcy) last week, with the firm MCR overseeing the process after another company, BDO,...
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Palin memoir number one
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, November 26, 2009 | 10:37 AM
Good lord, she is going to earn out that massive advance.Sarah Palin's Going Rogue will be Number One on the New York Times bestsellers chart this week.Dave...
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MS of A CHRISTMAS CAROL on display
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 | 12:39 PM
The messy, rushed manuscript of the beloved Dickens morality tale, A Christmas Carol, is on display at the Morgan Library and Museum, reports Claire Prentice...
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Borders UK doomed?
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, November 23, 2009 | 11:10 AM
Or so says the Bookseller Magazine, echoed by Publishers Lunch.Concerns about the fate of Borders UK rose over the past few days, as the Times declared...
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No Oprah book club?
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 4:33 PM
Media mogul Oprah Winfrey to end her show. It has just been announced. The iconic talk show will end in 2011, at the finish of the 25th season -- which...
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Bestselling Call Girl Lowers the Veil
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 | 12:39 PM
"Belle de Jour" drops her anonymityDr. Brooke Magnanti, a former call girl who published her memoirs as Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has revealed her...
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Andy Warhol's Little Red Hen for Sale
Children's book illustrations by Andy Warhol are to be auctioned in New York next month. The artist, who became famous for his pop art creations, including...
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BLUE MONDAY
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Sunday, November 15, 2009 | 10:39 AM
Occasionally research turns up the most wonderful tidbits of information. Unfortunately, those tidbits are usually irrelevant to the actual topic, but...
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Canada's Giller Prize won by priest abuse novel
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, November 13, 2009 | 11:18 AM
Linden MacIntyre, an investigative journalist who works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is the author of a novel about sex abuse scandals in...
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Kindle for your PC
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 | 11:24 AM
More digital news -- Amazon has launched their Kindle for PC application, and promises a Mac version coming soon. It ties in to the launch of Windows...
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Romance goes digital
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, November 9, 2009 | 11:38 AM
Is this a chance to express your romantic voice?Harlequin has announced the launch of Carina Press, a digital-only publishing house that will sell directly...
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Jane Austen's letters on show
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, November 6, 2009 | 11:36 AM
A major Jane Austen exhibition has opened in New York.Claire Prentice, reporting for the BBC, relates that over a hundred items, including rare letters...
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Design Your Own Envelope
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 | 11:12 AM
Design your own envelope --If you are famous, that is.The Pitney Bowes Pushing the Envelope campaign is an annual event where celebrities are invited...
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Lifeboat survivor's diary retrieved
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Sunday, November 1, 2009 | 11:34 AM
This evocative WW2 photo shows the last throes of the freighter SS Rhexenor, which was sunk by a German U-boat in the middle of the Atlantic on February...
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Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, October 30, 2009 | 12:43 PM
Who knows that Sir Henry Morton Stanley, coiner of the famous phrase above, had women in his party when he crossed Africa in 1877? Or that one of his...
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Historical thesaurus outdated already, but never mind, think positive
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, October 29, 2009 | 2:21 PM
Just to show how quickly a dictionary can be (ever so slightly) outdated, a new word has arrived already.It is OBAMUAnd the Japanese coined it.According...
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An interesting research experience
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 1:35 PM
Over August and September, Ron and I completed a lot of primary research at the British Library in London, a new building with many new and interesting...
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So now we know how much she got
Sarah Palin discloses $1.25 million from Harpercollins.In a disclosure form required under Alaska law, former governor Sarah Palin listed as income $1.25...
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Vast historical thesaurus unveiled after 40 years in the making
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | 1:55 PM
A forty-year project in the making, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is the first thesaurus to include the English vocabulary...
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World's first phonebook brings $170K at auction
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Saturday, October 24, 2009 | 1:07 PM
The world's first phone book has made history for the second time, having fetched $170,000 at auction. The twenty-page directory was published in November...
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It's never too late to return a library book
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 | 2:58 PM
Conscience struck after 70 years, and a book has been returned to the Cubitt Town Library, Tower Hamlets, East London.The BBC reports that Iris Chadwick...
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On Martha's Vineyard rivals combine to sell books
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 | 1:51 PM
Can you imagine Borders and B&N having a I-help-you-you-help-me relationship? Even when the aim is to serve the reading public better?It's being done...
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BOUNTY for sale
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Sunday, August 9, 2009 | 1:23 PM
Yes, the legendary HMS Bounty, scene of the most famous mutiny in British history, and the star of stirring nonfiction books, novels, and film adaptations,...
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More on Covers of Color
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, August 7, 2009 | 2:19 PM
Spymouse reminds me that the jacket for Andrea Levy's Small Island showed two young women, well-dressed in the style of the late 40s/ early 50s, passing...
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Blogging works! "Liar" jacket changed
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, August 6, 2009 | 2:14 PM
A few days ago I posted a comment about the white girl pictured on the jacket of Aussie author Justine Larbalestier's YA book about a black girl, and...
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Wiki Coffin poetry competition
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, August 3, 2009 | 2:32 PM
First there was the Booker longlist, and now there is the Wiki Coffin poetry competition!Yesterday, I received the following very amusing post:My Mom...
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Booker Long-lister has Long Battle with Wikipedia
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, July 31, 2009 | 2:04 PM
While I said there were few surprises with the long list for the Booker Prize, one of the new names has an interesting and thought-provoking background.Ed...
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BOOKER LONGLIST ANNOUNCED
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 | 2:05 PM
There are few surprises. The Booker Prize Longlist was announced this morning, and Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man is the only hope for independent publishers (with Random UK taking 5 slots). Coetzee is a two-time Booker winner; Byatt has won once.The...
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Joke finally seen after 79 years
I don't expect you to break out into hysterical laughter at this one, but a joke written by the playwright George Bernard Shaw has been found in an old...
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COVERS OF COLOR
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, July 24, 2009 | 3:43 PM
In a very interesting blog, well-traveled Australian YA author Justine Labalestier wonders why the girl pictured on the jacket of the US edition of her...
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Labels:
color,
covers,
labalestier,
oprah winfrey
SPY MOUSE LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, July 23, 2009 | 2:05 PM
Considering that the whispers have all been about publishing, Spy Mouse waxed positively -- and most entertainingly -- eloquent in response to my frivolous...
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National Library Lecture Series, Wellington
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 | 6:33 PM
NATIONAL LIBRARY SOCIETYWINTER LECTURE SERIESTHE CHANGING FACE OFMODERN PUBLISHINGThe National Library Auditorium, Aitken Street, Wellington at 5.30 pmGuests...
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To Clap or not to Clap
My blog has been neglected (weak excuse: school holidays), and I'm not even going to "talk" about books or the written word now, but pass on a story by...
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Books that change your life
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, July 13, 2009 | 7:31 PM
Small press publisher Jacqueline Church Simonds has just posted her list of books that changed her life. Every other book blogger does it, she says, so...
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Nigerian writer awarded African "Booker"
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Saturday, July 11, 2009 | 2:21 PM
Now, here is yet another writing prize I've never heard of before, and a very worthwhile and inspiring one, too -- even if some aspects of it are odd....
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Important new Captain Cook book
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Monday, July 6, 2009 | 3:48 PM
New Zealand's own expert on the life of James Cook, John Robson, has a new volume coming out in the UK, lovingly produced by Seaforth Publishing.According...
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Long-awaited sequel
Twenty years ago a novel set against the political backdrop of the newly independent India of the 1950s was published, and went on to sell more than...
2:08 PM | 0
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Whale Tale wins BBC non-fiction prize
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Friday, July 3, 2009 | 2:40 PM
Whales, it seems, are the flavor of the month. A book named Leviathan has won the twenty-thousand-pound BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.No, not...
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Those galleances again
Those loyal souls who have been reading this blog since it first began may remember a mystery I posed when reading the logbook kept by Capt. Samuel Wallis...
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Sailor's diary from Nelson's time
Written By Lingkar Dunia on Thursday, July 2, 2009 | 4:05 PM
Anna Brady reports in the Antiques Trade Gazette that a treasure from the Nelson era has been sold for a record sum.This is a very rare bird indeed --...
4:05 PM | 0
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Long time, no blog
Yes, yes, I know it has been a while. I have been sailing in Tupaia territory, including the island of his birth, Raiatea (pictured), where a breathtaking...
3:56 PM | 0
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