Icelandic film director Baltasar Kormakur has been compared with Spanish film director Almodovar for his debut film, an off-beat comedy, 101 Reykjavik. It set (of course) in Iceland, and is the story of a 28 year-old slacker, his mother, and the flamenco teacher they both fall in love with. The film won the Discovery Award for Best First Film at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. And Kormakur was just named by Variety as one of the Ten Directors to Watch.
Writer and editor Roger Angell has been a fiction editor at The New Yorker for over 40 years. And has written about baseball for the magazine for decades. His pieces about baseball have been collected in four books including Late Innings and The Summer Game. Angell new book is A Pitcher Story: Innings with David Cone (Warner Books). Cone is a celebrated pitcher, a Cy Young Award winner, and one of sixteen men in history to pitch a perfect game. Last year, pitching for the Yankees, Cone experienced his first major slump. Angell chronicles Cone struggle in his book.
Novelist Nick Hornby's new book is How to Be Good a novel about a bitter and sarcastic man who becomes a –do-gooder.— He also the author of the bestseller High Fidelity (which was made into a film starring John Cusack), Fever Pitch, and About a Boy. Hornby is also the pop music critic for The New Yorker.
Writer David Hajdu is the author of the new book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina. (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). The book focuses on the early 1960s when the four of them changed the nature of popular music. Hajdu is also the author of the award-winning biography, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. Hajdu also writes for The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
Andrew Kromah lives and works in Sierre Leone. The country has been rated the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. For eight years now Kromah has run an independent radio station (KISS-FM) in Freetown and has reported on the rebels and government. Each week, as Mr. Owl he investigates local corruption. Twice his building has been burned down. During the 1996 election there, Kromah and his staff were forced to broadcast from the bush to escape injury.
Jay Winik's new book, a bestseller, is April 1865: The Month That Saved America (HarperCollins). He writes that April 1865 is a month that could have unraveled the American nation. Instead it saved it. During that month the war ended with Lee surrender, Lincoln was assassinated, and the rebuilding of the nation began. Winik is a senior scholar at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.
Carol Muske-Dukes' new novel Life After Death (Random House) is the story of a woman who, one day, says to her husband in anger "Why don't you just die?" The next day, he drops dead. The book follows her journey into grief, self-reproach and self- discovery. Muske-Dukes directs the doctoral program in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California; she's published six collections of poetry, the most recent titled An Octave Above Thunder. She's also a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review.
We remember Mordecai Richler, Canadian social critic and novelist. He died Tuesday at the age of 70. Hes best known for his work chronicling Jewish life in Montreal in works like the book The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He died of complications from cancer.
Writer Alice Randall is the author of the controversial new parody of Gone with the Wind. Her book The Wind Done Gone (Houghton Mifflin). Randall retells the story of the antebellum South from the viewpoint of Cynara, a beautiful illegitimate mulatto woman, the daughter of a plantation-owning father, and a slave mother.
Film director Julien Temple. His new film Pandaemonium is set in the 1880s and is about the relationship between two poets: William Woodsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Temple is one of the early pioneers of music videos, directing the Kinks, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Janet Jackson. He also directed documentaries. His other films include the 1995 Bullet and the 1999 Vigo.
Editor and writer Walter Kirn's new novel Up in the Air (Doubleday) is about 35 year-old Ryan Bingham, a well-traveled business man who has a goal of accumulating one million miles in his frequent flyer account. Kirn is the literary editor for GQ and a contributing editor to Time and Vanity Fair. His fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. He also the author of two other novels, and a selection of short stories.
Casting director and actress Joanna Merlin has written a new guide for actors, Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide (Vintage Books). Merlin was casting director for Harold Prince and his productions of Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Evita, and more. She casted films, as well as acted in films and on television.
Historian and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins has written a new book Jefferson Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Beacon Press). Wilkins considers our founding fathers and their conflicting attitudes toward race and how it affects his own sense of patriotism. Wilkins is a professor of history at George Mason University, a Pulitzer-prize winner, and former Assistant Attorney General under President Johnson.
