“I’ve been shooting pool since I was four years old. No con. By the time I was six I was playing for stakes. My first sucker was a neighborhood kid in Washington Heights. I spotted him coming out of a candy store with an enormous bag of gumdrops. He was about five years older than me but I shot him straight pool and I won every last one of his gumdrops. He went home crying. When I was ten I started playing for cash” (Minnesota Fats, The Bank Shot and Other Robberies).My introduction to Minnesota Fats, legendary pool hustler: It’s...
London Review of Books Personal Ads, Redux: The Hits Just Keep On Comin’!
It’s September and, apparently, the season in Great Britain for love-lorn book lovers to sharpen their pencils and post some of the wittiest, most imaginative personal ads yet seen in a single issue of the London Review of Books:Without my grandfather’s contribution to agricultural reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips. While you think about that I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.I have a dream. And that dream is to try on every pair of shoes in the world. That’s where you come in: brusque, butch fem cobbler to 55 with expansive collection of...
Norman Mailer By Norman Mailer And Other Author Self-Portraits
One night in the mid-1960s, while working as a bartender at the Village Vanguard, the storied New York City jazz club, Burt Britton found himself all alone with Norman Mailer at last call.“What do you want from me, Kid,” Mailer inquired. Screwing up his courage, Britton blurted out, “draw me your self-portrait.” MailerNow, over forty years later, that self-portrait by Mailer is one of 213 self-portraits of writers, photographers, musicians, and athletes that Britton solicited. His collection is now being offered at auction byBloomsbury – New York on September 24, 2009: Arthur MillerPortrait of the Artist: The Burt Britton CollectionBritton...
Philippines Thanks USAID For 70,000 Books While Book Fair Tanks In U.S.
36,000 books were distributed last week to 50 school libraries in the provinces of Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani and the City of General Santos in the Philippines.As reported by Mindanao Magazine’s blogster, Mindanao Bob, book distribution was implemented by USAID’s Growth with Equity In Mindanao (GEM) in partnership with U.S.-based Children International Foundation. Through its Education Awareness Support Effort (EASE), the GEM Program has awarded 777 education matching grants, valued at more than $820,000, to the PTAs of schools in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and other conflict-affected areas in the island-region, and PTAs have contributed the same amount.As...
Library of Congress Celebrates the Joy of Reading
The Washington Mall is the site of the Library of Congress ninth annual National Book Festival, held this year on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 in Washington D.C.Scores of authors, illustrators and poets will be making presentations throughout the day in pavilions for Children, Teens & Children, Fiction, Mysteries & Thrillers, History & Biography, and Poetry & Prose.The popular Pavilion of the States site is back. Festival visitors can learn about the reading and literacy promotion projects as well as the literary traditions of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories. Representatives from throughout the nation will...