Atlanta Television Interview with Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help

Create Your Own Sports Superstar Contest for Kids

Dodie Ownes -- School Library Journal, 2/17/2010

Inspired by its partnership with Sports Illustrated KIDS, Stone Arch Books is sponsoring a nationwide contest for students in grades three to six. The challenge? Kids are invited to create their very own sports super star. Entrants will have a chance to have their fictional characters featured in an upcoming Sports Illustrated KIDS graphic novel. And the winning student, along with his or her school, will be featured on a page at the back of the new book. Online voters can choose their favorite sports character from the top five entries posted on the contest’s Web site. The top 50 entrants will receive two free Sports Illustrated KIDS graphic novels, one for the student and other for the school library. The contest runs through March 1, 2010.
(reprinted with permission)

Joe Hill's newest, out today.

Here's a widget with all things Horns--not for the faint of heart. Wha ha ha ha!!!!! We urge you to make your purchase through the Indie Bound link!

Interesting WWI poster from the American Library Association

Cookbook Preview: Pig out with this new cookbook!

Pig: King of the Southern Table by James Villas
If Pig is indeed King, then there is trouble at the castle, for Villas (Dancing in the Lowcountry) has stormed the gates and had at him, leaving no sweetbread, shoulder or chop untasted. So, let the commoners rejoice, here are 300 recipes from Southern hog heaven that are juicy, flirtatious, and, at times, scary.

Bravehearts will want to immediately dive into the Variety and Special Meats chapter for some deviled pork liver; hog’s head stew; and brains and eggs. The upper crust might prefer a pork pie. Choices include spicy Tennessee sausage; Pork, Apple and Raisin; or Bacon and Corn. A section on Barbecue and Ribs includes both North and South Carolina styles of BBQ and a half dozen Sparerib options. And where lesser authors might stray off topic when moving to side dishes, Villas, with 13 cookbooks and two James Beard awards under his belt, knows better. All 39 Vegetable and Rice dishes are chock full of oink, from the mushy turnips with bacon and pork, to the slab bacon hoppin’ John. Similarly, there are 20 breads that are decidedly not fat-free. That other Southern king, Elvis, would surely have appreciated the Bacon-Peanut Butter Muffins, perhaps chased down with a lard hoecake or some bacon-grease hush puppies. (May)

(this review used with permission from Publisher's Weekly.)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6718997.html?nid=4599&source=title&rid=18569552

Cathy recommends....

THE BLACK BOOK 35th Anniversary Edition By Middleton A. Harris
With a new foreword by Toni Morrison and the original introduction by Bill Cosby

Seventeenth-century sketches of Africa as it appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.

In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly 500 others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America: The Black Book. Now in a deluxe 35th anniversary hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith, as well as Middleton Harris and Toni Morrison (then a Random House editor, now a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Nobel laureate) spent months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials from transcripts of fugitive slaves trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and other celebrated abolitionists to chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century to vibrant posters from Black Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s.

A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented, and featuring a new Foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work.

New Authors on Tour -Live! podcast with Stephen Hunter

Authors On Tour - Live! is a series of live podcasts made possible by the Tattered Cover Book Store, a premiere independent bookstore with three locations in Colorado. The podcasts and this site are produced by BurstMarketing, a podcasting publishing company in Denver.

Today's featured podcast is with Stephen Hunter for his book I, Sniper. You can connect with it here: http://authorsontourlive.com/stephen-hunter-podcasts-i-sniper/