In addition, novelist Maxine Hong Kingston was named the 28th recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, which "honors a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition.”
It was about five minutes to closing at the Grandview branch library the other day. Everything was in motion as library users and staff scrambled to finish last minute tasks. A mom and her son rushed in the door but seemed confused by all the activity. Did you know that while our buildings have day and evening hours the Library's online branch is available 24 hours a day? At any hour of night or day you can access our WWWeb Branch to:
The Glendale Public library is far more than our buildings filled with great books and wonderful people. It is also your round-the-clock, round-the-worldwide-web access point for the best in information and entertainment. Come to any of our branches, including our library branch on WWWeb Street. You can even create an account online.
The performance will include a discussion with the choreographers and dancers and takes place in the Brand Library Art Galleries. A reception for the dancers will follow the performance.
Lots of authors were born this week and a few good and bad things occurred in the events list. The names are mostly well known but don't get into superseller status until the middle of the week as February, the best seller month, winds down toward the juvenile in March. On the 26th we have Victor Hugo who was so popular in France that the country turned his eightieth birthday into a national holiday. After that is Daniel Handler, better known as the wildly popular Lemony Snicket.
Then, Californian Nobel Prizewinner John Steinbeck shows up and then we get some fine literary names for the rest of the week, like Laurence Durell, William Dean Howells, James T. Farrell, and Ralph Ellison. There are other classics both literary and genre related in the same long list.
February gives us more super sellers this week. There are the mystery writers Margaret Truman and Ruth Rendell along with suspense specialist Len Deighton and humorist Erma Bombeck, all of whom were very popular in years past and still today. While not being a prolific writer, the unique timeframes of Jean Auel's books set in prehistoric times have always been in high demand. 
This week's question: There are several well known poets born in this week. W. H. Auden, James Russell Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Nobel prizewinner, the Greek poet, George Seferis. 
The Glendale Central Library is undergoing a long, slow renovation process that will affect where things are located in the building. At the moment, in an effort to streamline our services, we have created a Self Pick-Up shelving area for you to claim whatever you have requested from other branches, from the Pasadena library system, or has come in from being checked out. That is, you can pick up anything for which you were notified via email, phone call, or postcard.
More bestselling authors are in another February list this week. France's great mystery writer, Georges Simenon, America's slick pop writer and producer, Sidney Sheldon, fantasist Jane Yolen, and childhood angst maven Judy Blume have all been both prolific writers and sure sellers. The inventor of the Simpsons, Matt Groening, has sold a few million of his print and media products as well, as did blockbuster screenwriter and director Joseph Mankiewicz.
Dr. Zhivago's creator, Boris Pasternak, reached millions of book sales as it was a middle brow Book of the Month Club selection, and millions more saw the movie based on the book. He was one of the few more commonly read winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Millions more copies of Bertolt Brecht's plays of alienation had been printed but rather than being sold in the commercial marketplace they were bought as assigned reading for literature and theatre students. It probably took Brecht fifty years to match the sales in Pasternak's two years of mainstream interest. 
Ever wanted to know what REALLY goes on at your local public library? 
Grandview Library just installed new outdoor seating for your enjoyment. Stop by and take a load off!
As indicated before it's bestselling authors on parade this week. Within this span of a few days in February we have the birth dates of popular and prolific authors Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, John Grisham, Alice Walker and Andrew Greeley all of whom who have sold books in the millions to readers and to public libraries like this one. 
Besides those very popular fiction writers there are also literary names well known to more serious readers, such as playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Brendan Behan, poet Amy Lowell, and countercultural heroes Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs, most of whom have sold millions of copies to college libraries and their students after their deaths. 
This Week's Question: Christopher Marlowe, perhaps born this week, (no one really knows,) was killed at the age of twenty-nine in May of 1593, according to official transcripts, possibly as a result of his underworld spying activities. Before that time he had written the plays Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine (parts 1 and 2), The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and his first, at the age of twenty-three, a collaboration called Dido, Queen of Carthage. Because of his poetical and dramatic skills there is little doubt in many literary historians' views that had he lived he would have been not just a contemporary but an equal to William Shakespeare. However, there has been ongoing controversy among only a very few that he, among other candidates, was, in fact, the man who wrote the plays attributed to a front man known as 'Shakespeare'. While recognizing that no one has ever proved, nor likely can, that Marlowe, nor any of the others, was Shakespeare, a few base facts are nonetheless tantalizing. Marlowe was born in 1564. When was Shakespeare born? And at what age did Shakespeare begin his playwriting career? "A warrior queen gives birth to a child who links the world to the monsters of a young man's dreams. A nobleman chooses a beautiful commoner for his bride, and the boy who loved her discovers her darkest secret dangling in the forest. In ten sharp tales, Lanagan pushes the short story form and the genre of fantasy to their limits....These stories are turgid with love, loss, hope, despair, and the sense that there must be more to the world than that which can be touched with hands....The result is stories that unsettle and explore. They are a pleasure at every level." (Voice Of Youth Associates)
"Seventeen-year-old slacker Shaun steps off the curb and is smacked by a cement-mixer truck. Just before he goes under, a curiously sneaky 'fallen angel' named Kiriel steps into Shaun's body. Thus begins Kiriel's near doe-eyed exploration of all the weird, whacked-out wonders of teenage boyhood.... The infusion of Kiriel's inquisitively dogged personality into Shaun's teenaged body humorously amplifies all of Shaun's usual boy instincts: Lust, hunger and love all spring to the center, most affecting when Kiriel's educated near-Shakespearean words spout forth from Shaun's usually blunt and blasé lips....Kiriel's own search for meaning and direction from his own realm in this new life packs an intriguingly deep wallop." (Kirkus Reviews)
The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural edited by Deborah Noyes
Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
"On the night of each full moon, the five Transylvanian sisters who reside in the castle Piscul Dracului don their finest gowns. They raise their hands to create shadows against the wall, opening a portal to the Other Kingdom, where they will dance the night away with all manner of fantastical creatures. After nine years of full moons spent in delightful revelry, dark forces, both human and otherworldly, arise to encroach upon the sisters' happiness. Told by Jena, the second oldest sister, this detailed and mood-rich story covers much territory, both mundane and magical. Adult fantasy writer Marillier has uniquely reimagined and blended an assortment of well-known tales and characters--including fairies, dwarves, witches, vampires, and a frog who is more than he seems--into a compelling whole in her first book for teens." (Booklist)
"Aislinn knows that fairies are real and that they aren't the small, cute, winged beings that most people imagine. She has inherited the gift of Sight from her mother's family, allowing her to see them. She lives by rules that have kept her safe from their notice. All of that changes when Keenan, the Summer King, chooses her as his queen, involving Aislinn in a 900-year power struggle between him and his mother, the Winter Queen. If Aislinn refuses him, summer will cease to exist, killing both mortals and fairies alike. If she accepts, she loses her humanity and ties to the mortal world—as if life as a teenager isn't hard enough when you're 'normal.'" (School Library Journal)
Find these and more suggestions at Glendale Public
