The easy answer is that she was the author of the Mary Poppins books that resulted in a beloved Disney movie and a Broadway musical.But Travers played other roles during her 96 years: she was an actress and a journalist in Australia and the U.K.; she wrote propaganda for the U.S. during the Second World War; she was a poet respected by the great Irish poets.

Read the full article on The Chronicle Herald.

It was an offer author Mark Winegardner could not refuse when he was asked to finish off the saga of America’s most powerful fictional crime family, the Corleone clan, and let them rest in peace.

…Winegardner has just released the final novel in the series, “The Godfather’s Revenge,” which moves the family onto its biggest stage of all — the intersection of organised crime and national politics.

Full article, Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters

Teach Yourself Travel Writing
By Cynthia Dial

• Get it: McGraw-Hill, $12.95.

• Basics: Dial, a travel writer since 1988, has journeyed countless miles across the globe, has published hundreds of travel articles and teaches a class on travel writing in Southern California. Teach Yourself Travel Writing is the result of her experiences.

• Tips: Dial discusses how to get started, trip preparation, the elements of a good article, finding a market and the importance of keeping accurate records. What separates the traveler from the travel writer? She says anyone who pursues the profession should be creative, resourceful, self-motivated, organized, adventurous and broad-minded.                         -CHICAGO TRIBUNE

After putting in years of research into books, like his latest The Last Mughal, he’s a little touchy about the slightly condescending tag ‘popular historian’.

“I bristle at the term ‘popular history’. I think the central issue of how good or not a work of history is, how important, how scholarly a work of history, does not depend on the style in which it’s written. Whether it’s enclosed in a cocoon of post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, foucaultian, post-saidian jargon but the quality of its primary research,” says Dalrymple.

While the author prefers the term ‘narrative historian’, what seems to be the flip side of being a best-selling author, is that he is largely disowned by the country’s academic historians.

get the full story and see video from CNN-IBN

Best-selling author Adriana Trigiani proves over and over again that there’s no place like home. The New York-based writer hails from the southwest Virginia town of Big Stone Gap, the setting for a trilogy of novels featuring Ave Maria Machesney. Trigiani has completed the fourth installment of her heroine’s journey, appropriately called “Home to Big Stone Gap.”

read an excerpt from the novel and full story here

 In Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate: a book of musings (OoF 2003), she talks about her motives for writing.  “I write for myself.  I write because I enjoy stories and make believe.  I write because if I didn’t I’d probably go crazy (OoF 304).”  

Tan shares Masha Hamilton’s use of writing to understand life and probe experience.  “I write about questions that disturb me, images that mystify me, or memories that cause me anguish and pain.  I write about secrets, lies, and contradictions, because within them are many kinds of truth. …  I write about life as I have misunderstood it.  To be sure it’s a Chinese-American life, but it’s the only one I’ve had so far (OoF 304-5).”

In all previous novels she has mined the Chinese-American experience by creating parallel stories – one set in America and one set in China, but Saving Fish from Drowning( SFD) maintains only a vestige of doubleness.  The narration begins in America but quickly shifts to China and Burma for most of the novel, returning only to contemporary American moments in a collage of characters’ lives after they returned.  Our novel has a unique doubleness.  The ghost of Bibi Chen presides over the world as we know it, filling us in on all the angles and possible pitfalls to come.

The inside track lets us see all the characters so we have a sense of simultaneous events unknown to the people caught up in them.  Saving Fish from Drowning achieves the sense of syncopation and tension between the known and unknown through Bibi’s supernatural sight (and insight).  This can lead to hilarity with an undertone of menace

The editor of design magazine Icon has been suspended from the title, allegedly for writing a book.

Publisher Media 10 has confirmed that Icon editor Marcus Fairs has been put on gardening leave, but refused to respond to allegations that the editor was suspended because of his book launch. Publisher Daren Newton told Press Gazette he would not comment on the matter because of ongoing legal proceedings. But according to several well-placed sources, Fairs ran into trouble after publication of his first book, Twenty-First Century Design, last month.

read more, Online Press Gazette

NEW YORK, Oct 31 (Reuters Life!) - Frank Beddor, best known for producing the comedy film “There’s Something about Mary,” began writing seven years ago — and says there’s no looking back.

His debut novel, “The Looking Glass Wars,” claims to tell the truth about Alice in Wonderland, or Princess Alyss, who fled with bodyguard Hatter Madigan to the real world after her mother, the queen, was overthrown by her older sister Redd. Alyss is later sucked back into Wonderland.

Read more here