The Korea Herald

Book fair to tackle challenges of digital age storytelling

Oct 9, 2011

BERLIN (AFP) ― Authors once just had to deal with a publisher but are now being forced to embrace the digital age and negotiate the rights to their works for TV, films and ebooks. Organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair, which opens on Wednesday, said the challenges thrown up by the upheaval in the book world would be a central theme at the world’s biggest gathering of industry movers and shakers....
Founder of Dead Poets Society visits bards’ graves

Oct 9, 2011

FREEPORT, Maine (AP) ― The founder of the Dead Poets Society of America is visiting graves and other sites associated with Jack Kerouac and five others in his effort to recognize fallen bards. Walter Skold of Freeport, Maine, says the Dead Poets 2011 Magic Bus Tour is in Massachusetts on Friday to pay homage to John Whittier, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Louisa May Alcott a...
New Books

Oct 7, 2011

Dinner without a recipe The Kitchen Counter Cooking School By Kathleen Flinn (Viking) If you are going to read one book to change your diet and your life, “The Kitchen Counter Cooking School” is it. The second book by Le Cordon Bleu graduate Kathleen Flinn starts with her stalking a woman in the grocery store, but it ends better than you‘d expect. Flinn is struck by the number of boxes and c...
Author gives an insider’s guide to publishing

Oct 7, 2011

Jennifer Basye Sander has forgotten more about the publishing business than most of us will ever know. The New York Times best-selling author has written and co-written more than 50 books, including “The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Getting Published” (Alpha, $19.95, 400 pages; the fifth edition goes on sale Nov. 1). Sander, a Granite Bay, California, resident, is a former senior editor at Random ...
Grand Canyon’s majestic echoes

Oct 7, 2011

The vicarious pleasure of armchair travel is a well-explored genre for books, transporting the reader without ever opening a door. What such books do, when they are thoughtfully presented, is to share the excitement and immediacy of exploration while sparing the reader the discomfort. In “The Grand Canyon Reader,” Lance Newman’s editing challenge was to illuminate an iconic place while offering ...
Japanese writer talks about life as laborer

Oct 5, 2011

Kenta Nishimura in Seoul for release of award-winning ‘Labor Train’ He barely finished middle school, made his living as a day laborer, spent most of his money on liquor and sex, and somehow turned himself into a best-selling author. When Japanese writer Kenta Nishimura shared the prestigious 144th Akutagawa Prize for his autobiographical novel “Labor Train” (Keuki Ressha) in January, it was th...
Annual New Yorker Fest has Shakespearean twist

Oct 5, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) ― To gab, perchance to argue. Ay, there’s the way to make New Yorker magazine fans happy. And so it was a delicious moment at the annual New Yorker Festival this past weekend when Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro mused to his co-panelist, Hollywood director Roland Emmerich: “I’ve long been interested in why smart people say dumb things.” Shapiro may have been musing, but Emmerich...
Spain: Fugitive Basque separatist wins lit prize

Oct 4, 2011

MADRID (AP) ― A fugitive who escaped Spanish jail 25 years ago has been awarded one of the Basque country’s top literary awards, but told he cannot have the money that goes with it until he hands himself into authorities. The Basque regional government gave the award to Joseba Sarrionandia on Monday but is withholding the 18,000 euro ($24,000) stipend until he comes forward and “regularizes” his...
Abuzz over Adonis for Nobel Literature Prize

Oct 3, 2011

STOCKHOLM (AFP) ― Predicting the Nobel Literature Prize winner is near-impossible as the Swedish Academy stays tight-lipped and often honours writers off the beaten path ― so could it be Syrian poet Adonis this year? Each year the names of popular authors are tossed about ― U.S. novelists Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy to name a few ― but their work may actually be too widely...
New Books

Sept 30, 2011

Dreadfully distasteful lists Ten Ways to Recycle a Corpse: and 100 More Dreadfully Distasteful Lists By Karl Shaw (Three Rivers Press) This book could be called magnetic. It pulls you in, the way a magnet pulls a paper clip, and it doesn’t want to let you go. It recounts Julius Caesar’s attempt to cure his baldness and Cleopatra’s recommendation: the bodies of domestic mice, burnt and ground...
Star-crossed lovers go against norm in late Joseon

Sept 30, 2011

Lost Souls By Hwang Sun-won (Columbia University Press) Late author Hwang Sun-won’s short story “Lost Souls” is a lot of things. It’s a story of star-crossed lovers, a literary record of Korea’s turbulent late Joseon period, as well as a tragic case of two innocent souls who went against everything they used to be and believe. In many ways, it is a modernist piece of work. The young protagoni...
Anthony Bourdain has no reservations about publishing gig

Sept 30, 2011

Anthony Bourdain rolled up his right sleeve to show off his tattoo ― not of a beating cobra heart or other adventure from his Travel Channel show “No Reservations.” It comes from a book, Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer,” which describes a coin Montaigne had struck. Bourdain explains that the coin, and the tattoo, bear the 16th ce...
Russian Orthodox Church slams 2 acclaimed authors

Sept 29, 2011

MOSCOW (AP) ― A senior Russian Orthodox official claimed Wednesday that novels by Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez justify pedophilia and said they should be banned in the nation’s high schools. Father Vsevolod Chaplin’s demand that Russia’s government investigate and limit the use of the books was his church’s latest attempt to impose religious norms in a country that once rejected r...
Paju book fest to celebrate literature, history

Sept 28, 2011

Ko Un, Lee O-young, Richard Booth to participate in nine-day event Paju Book City, home to some 260 Korean publishing companies in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, is throwing a book-themed festival from Oct. 1 to 9, celebrating literature and its history with highly acclaimed participants from home and abroad. Dubbed “Paju BookSori Festival,” the festival will hold diverse book-themed events, includin...
Alain de Botton examines religion as institution

Sept 27, 2011

Swiss-born writer visits Seoul with new book ‘Religion for Atheists’ Philosopher and author Alain de Botton grew up in a Jewish family where religion was thought to be “completely ridiculous,” and it took him a while for him to say he didn’t agree. “Anyone who was religious, to say bluntly, was thought to be an idiot,” de Botton told reporters at a press conference promoting the Korean edition ...