Hackley Public Library designated a Literary Landmark for connection to children's author Verna Aardema Vugteveen

Hackley Public Library designated a Literary Landmark for connection to children's author Verna Aardema Vugteveen: The designation honors the library's resources and staff's contributions to the children's author's career.

From the Muskegon Chronicle.

Meet Janet Evanovich

Lilian Jackson Braun

Lilian Jackson Braun Braun, the author of the extremely popular Cat Who... Mysteries, died at 97 over the weekend. Click here for an obituary.

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The history of Lilian Jackson Braun is perhaps as exciting and mysterious as her novels. Between 1966 and 1968, she published three novels to critical acclaim: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern and The Cat Who Turned On and Off. In 1966, The New York Times labeled Braun, “the new detective of the year.” Then, for reasons unknown, the rising mystery author disappeared from the publishing scene. It wasn’t until 1986 that the Berkley Publishing Group reintroduced Braun to the public with the publication of an original paperback, The Cat Who Saw Red. Within two years, Berkeley released four new novels in paperback and reprinted the three mysteries from the sixties. G.P. Putnam’s Sons has since published seventeen Cat Who… novels. Most recently being The Cat Who Went Up The Creek, The Cat Who Smelled Rat, The Cat Who Robbed The Bank, The Cat Who Saw Stars, The Cat Who Tailed a Thief, The Cat Who Blew the Whistle, The Cat Who Said Cheese, The Cat Who Came to Breakfast, The Cat Who Went Into The Closet, The Cat Who Wasn’t There, The Cat Who Moved The Mountain, The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal, The Cat Who Lived High, The Cat who Talked to Ghosts, The Cat Who Went Underground, The Cat Who Sniffed Glue, The Cat Who Saw Stars, and lastly, The Cat Who Sang For the Birds. Even though Braun claims that her cats have never done anything extraordinary, her fictional cats, Koko and Yum Yum, solve crimes and delight fans in book after book. Braun says the reason for her success is that “people are simply tired of all the blood. I write what is called the classic mystery.” She says that while “not all mystery fans like cats, all cat-fanciers seem to like mysteries. That makes for a large audience, since 26% of all American households own 53.9 million cats between them.” Braun was the “Good Living” editor of The Detroit Free Press for 29 years. She is retired from journalism and is currently writing mysteries full-time, her latest Cat Who… novel is titled The Cat Who Brought Down The House. She lives with two Siamese cats and her husband, Earl Bettinger, in North Carolina. Used courtesy of Penguin Publishers

Night Road, by Kristin Hannah

Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell

Emily Giffin Discusses "Heart of the Matter"

Happy Birthday Agatha Christie!

Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time. She has sold over two billion books worldwide and has been translated into over 45 languages. In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote eighty novels and short story collections. She also wrote over a dozen plays, including The Mousetrap, which is now the longest running play in theatrical history. Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. One of the most famous fictional creations of all time, Poirot's 'little grey cells' triumphed over some of the most devious criminal minds ever created in crime fiction. Christie’s last published novel, Sleeping Murder, featured her other world-famous sleuth, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead. Miss Marple appears in twelve novels, and twenty short stories; the first novel to feature her was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. The Poirot and Marple novels have been widely dramatized in feature films and television movies. Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), And Then There Were None (1945), and Death on the Nile (1978) are a few of the successful films based on her works. Agatha Christie also wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. She also wrote non-fiction; one book Come Tell Me How you Live, describes her archeological travels with her husband Max and the other two are collections of poems, stories and verses, some with a religious theme. She also wrote her autobiography which she completed in 1976. Although synonymous with crime fiction, the breadth of themes in her novels is quite extraordinary and she deserves her place as one of the best-loved writers of all time. To learn more about this author visit her website.

Janet Evanovich-author interview

Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker

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Robert B. Parker has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction. His novel featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser have earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim, typified by R.W.B. Lewis’ comment, “We are witnessing one of the great series in the history of the American detective story” (The New York Times Book Review). Robert Parker’s most recent bestsellers include his Spenser novel, Widow’s Walk, and Death in Paradise, his third Jesse Stone novel. His first western, Gunman’s Rhapsody was published in 2001. Parker’s other works include the classic Poodle Springs, a novel completed from an unfinished manuscript begun by the late Raymond Chandler, and Perchance To Dream, the sequel to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Appropriately, Parker had written about Chandler in a chapter of his doctoral thesis about the evolution of the American Hero, beginning with the colonial period and ending with the twentieth century mystery writers. As fate would have it, Parker has now become one of the best of them: “Robert B. Parker has taken his place besides the Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald” (The Boston Globe). Born and raised in Massachusetts, Parker attended Colby College in Maine, served with the Army in Korea, and then completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston University. He married his wife Joan in 1956; they raised two sons, David and Daniel. Together the Parkers founded Pearl Productions, a Boston-based independent film company named after their short-haired pointer, Pearl, who has also been featured in Parker’s last few novels. He and Joan now live in the Boston area. Parker began writing his Spenser novels in 1971 while teaching at Boston’s Northeastern University. Little did he suspect then that his witty, literate prose and psychological insights would make him keeper-of-the-flame of America’s rich tradition of detective fiction. Parker’s fictional Spenser inspired the ABC-TV series Spenser: For Hire. More recently, the Spenser novels Small Vices and Thin Air have been made into television films for the A&E network. Parker has recently been named Grand Master of the 2002 Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor shared with earlier masters such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen. Used courtesy of Penguin Publishers. Mr. Parker died today, January 19, 2010

Author: Richard Russo

Richard Russo

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Empire Falls Review by Alden Mudge Richard Russo renders timely portrait of American life Although Richard Russo believes he is "essentially a comic novelist" and his big, lively fifth novel, , is often very, very funny, we don't get around to discussing humor until our long telephone conversation is almost over. "In interviews it's often this way," Russo says, bemused. "I think the darker aspect of my fiction—or anybody's fiction—is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. Humor is notoriously difficult to discuss. Think about it: college literature courses almost always focus on very serious, often humorless works; they tend not to be about great comic novels or great comic writers. Even when they teach Shakespeare, they move from the comedies to the more serious and therefore more important tragedies. I reject that view completely." Readers of such earlier Russo novels as Straight Man or Nobody's Fool will know exactly what he means. Probably no other contemporary American novelist writes as well or with such wicked, unsparing humor about working class life as Russo. He may care deeply about his characters, but he doesn't always let them off easy. "It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can," Russo says with a chuttering laugh that sounds a bit like Richard Dreyfuss. "I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them." According to Russo, the hilarious and the heartbreaking naturally converged five or six years ago as he began the ruminations that would lead to . "When I began working on this book I saw a guy from my youth who just reminded me of a certain kind of male who in his later years still likes to put on a kind of lady's man air. For some reason I started dwelling on this kind of adolescent, who in his 50s or 60s is still tracking in a kind of sexual rut. And I immediately saw him as one of these guys who would be singing Perry Como. That was a small thing. "The bigger thing was that since the shootings in Paducah, I had been thinking about the pressures that kids are under. As a father of two daughters, I had been dwelling in some sort of dark way on the question that everybody always asks after a school shooting and then promptly forgets—why? The problem is that there are so many answers and so many sociological reasons for it. But even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. Novels are in a unique position to explore something like this in a way that hits home. So this is a book that has a lot to do with kids and adults who somehow or other in this culture of ours never manage to grow up." Russo's early thoughts about the book are reflected in the two poles of his narrative. There is the hilarious Walt Comeau, aka "The Silver Fox," a barroom blowhard who aspires to a health club empire that reaches from Empire Falls, Maine, to, well, at least as far away as Massachusetts. And there is the quiet, talented, deeply troubled teenager John Voss, a character who seems drawn directly from recent headlines. "Unfortunately, this book is timely," Russo says, commenting on some of the more chilling aspects of his portrait of Voss. "I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them." If John Voss and Walt Comeau represent the extremes of the fictional world of , Miles Roby is at its center. Roby is the manager of the Empire Grill, a diner with growing culinary pretensions in the heart of Empire Falls, a dying milltown controlled by the Whiting family. As the novel opens, Miles is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Janine, worried about his exceptionally bright, sensitive daughter, Tick (who befriends her odd, silent classmate, John Voss), and is seemingly paralyzed by an uncomfortable web of obligations to his less-than-responsible father, to the memory of his mother, and to his employer, Mrs. Whiting, who owns the Empire Grill, along with almost everything else in town. Mrs. Whiting, one of Russo's most sharply drawn characters, is a study in a sort of gloved malevolence which gives the book both a spiritual and a political cast. "If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life," Russo says when asked about the broader meaning of Miles' difficulties with Mrs. Whiting. "If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to." Of course, Russo is a novelist, not a politician or a theoretician, so his views get worked out through the messy, human interactions of his characters. Still, his choice of subject seems to put him somewhat at odds with much of contemporary writing. Like his other books, is a big novel with lots of characters and wide-ranging perspectives. It also focuses on an America that now seems to be out of the mainstream. Says Russo, "My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. I find that by ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. My best sense is to ignore much of what is going on in the culture at large and to focus on some of the things that are still of interest to me." Luckily, a good many readers seem to be interested as well. Since he collaborated on the film version of Nobody's Fool, which starred Paul Newman, Russo has seen a resurgence of interest in his novels and the rise of a parallel career as a screenwriter. He now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies. Freed from the need to support his family by teaching, Russo seems to have entered a remarkably productive period of his life. "I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry," Russo says at the end of our conversation, "but it hasn't been a problem to this point. I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell." Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California. © 2003, All rights reserved, BookPage

Dan Brown, Author of The DaVinci Code and the just released Lost Symbol

Dan Brown

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Dan Brown is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Da Vinci Code -- one of the best selling novels of all time. In early 2004, all four of Dan Brown's novels held spots on the New York Times bestseller list during the same week. Recently named one of the World's 100 Most Influential People by TIME Magazine, Dan Brown has made appearances on CNN, The Today Show, National Public Radio, Voice of America, as well as in the pages of Newsweek, Forbes, People, GQ, The New Yorker, and others. His novels have been translated and published in more than 40 languages around the world. Dan is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spent time as an English teacher before turning his efforts fully to writing. In 1996, his interest in code-breaking and covert government agencies led him to write his first novel, Digital Fortress, which quickly became a #1 national bestselling eBook. Set within the clandestine National Security Agency, the novel explores the fine line between civilian privacy and national security. Brown’s follow-up techno-thriller, Deception Point, centered on similar issues of morality in politics, national security, and classified technology. The son of a Presidential Award winning math professor and of a professional sacred musician, Dan grew up surrounded by the paradoxical philosophies of science and religion. These complementary perspectives served as inspiration for his acclaimed novel Angels & Demons—a science vs. religion thriller set within a Swiss physics lab and Vatican City. Recently, he has begun work on a series of symbology thrillers featuring his popular protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of iconography and religious art. The upcoming series will include books set in Paris, London, and Washington D.C. Dan’s wife Blythe—an art historian and painter—collaborates on his research and accompanies him on his frequent research trips, their latest to Paris, where they spent time in the Louvre for his thriller, The Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code has sold some 40 million copies worldwide and is now being adapted for film by Columbia Pictures. Used courtesy of www.danbrown.com Explosive thriller explores secrets of the church Editor's Note: Dan Brown's blockbuster novel, which has continued to generate controversy and huge sales worldwide since its publication in 2003, is now also available in a Special Illustrated Edition, with 150 color images of relevant artworks, symbols and religious icons. Interview by Edward Morris What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set Dan Brown's absorbing novel, The Da Vinci Code, in motion and then send it pinballing through a labyrinth of intricate schemes, sidetracks and deceptions. Threaded through the story are plot-related codes and cryptograms that impel the reader to brainstorm with the protagonists, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (introduced in Angels & Demons) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu. An after-hours murder at the Louvre swirls these two strangers into the middle of an ongoing combat between the Priory of Sion, a shadowy order that dates back to the Crusades, and Opus Dei, a relatively new bastion of Catholic conservatism. "I first learned of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's affiliation with the Priory of Sion when I was studying art history at the University of Seville," Brown says in a telephone interview from his home in New Hampshire. "One day, the professor showed us a slide of The Last Supper and began to outline all the strange anomalies in the painting. My awareness of Opus Dei came through an entirely different route and much later in my life. After studying the Vatican to write Angels & Demons, I became interested in the secrecy of the Vatican and some of the unseen hierarchy. Through that, I also became interested in Opus Dei and met some of the people in it." While the characters and storylines of The Da Vinci Code are manifestly his own contrivances, Brown stresses that all the contextual details about history, biography, location and art are true. "One of the aspects that I try very hard to incorporate in my books is that of learning," he says. "When you finish the book—like it or not—you've learned a ton. I had to do an enormous amount of research [for this book]. My wife is an art historian and a Da Vinci fanatic. So I had a leg up on a lot of this, but it involved numerous trips to Europe, study at the Louvre, some in-depth study about the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and about the art of Da Vinci." Weighty as it is, Brown's scholarship never slows down the sizzling action. Robert and Sophie stay on the run at a breathless pace as menacing characters pop up in their flight path like silhouettes in a shooting gallery. Unlike a conventional mystery, in which clues become clear only in hindsight, many of the clues here are presented as such: a dying murder victim who arranges his body a particular way, a slip of paper with a phrase scribbled on it that may be a light-shedding anagram, a line of seemingly random numbers. "For some reason, I was a good math student," Brown says, explaining his involvement with codes and symbols. "And language came easily. Cryptology and symbology are really fusions of math and language. My father is a well-known mathematician. I grew up around codes and ciphers. In The Da Vinci Code, there's a flashback where Sophie recalls her grandfather creating this treasure hunt through the house for a birthday present. That's what my father did for us." Beyond spinning a good yarn within a richly factual context, Brown admits to yet another aim. "I am fascinated with the gray area between right and wrong and good and evil. Every novel I've written so far has explored that gray area." He reveals that his next novel will deal with "the oldest and largest secret society on earth" and with "the secret history of our nation's capital." No release date has yet been set for the new novel, which will be titled The Solomon Key. Brown concedes that turning Christianity's most fiercely held beliefs into fictional fodder may spark some controversy. But he says it's a risk worth taking. "I worked very, very hard to make the book fair to all parties. Yes, it's explosive. I think there will be people for whom this book will be—well, 'offensive,' may be too strong a word. But it will probably raise some eyebrows." © 2003, All rights reserved, BookPage