Category Archives: Authors

A Conversation with Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us: How to Engage Your Readers

By bicadmin | Published: November 21, 2013

Reyna Grande, author of Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and The Distance Between Us, is a sought-after speaker at middle/high schools, colleges and universities around the country. Born in Mexico, Reyna was raised by her grandparents after her parents left her behind while they worked in the US. She came to the US at the age of nine as an undocumented immigrant and went on to become the first person in her family to obtain a higher education. We spoke with Reyna about her most recent book, The Distance Between Us, and her thoughts about how to engage readers, particularly students.

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Featured Venue: The Evolution of Fairfax Reads

By bicadmin | Published: November 21, 2013

Ted Kavich, program and educational services manager for Fairfax County Library, takes All Fairfax Reads in a new and exciting direction!

BIC: The Fairfax Reads program was recently transitioned into a Book Club Conference model. What made you decide to make this switch, and how has the experience been so far?

TK: Actually, September’s Book Club Conference was just one of the new directions we hope to explore in the coming months/years. There are so many cool, “outside the box” kinds of events we’d like to coordinate, and of course our time and resources are limited. Thus, All Fairfax Reads (a successful program series for sure) was retired so we could move forward with some new and innovative types of events. The Book Club Conference was an amazing start to this effort – a hugely successful event with great turnout (250 attendees, our max capacity due to venue size), completely positive feedback, and an excellent keynote speaker (Will Schwalbe). We are so glad we reached out to book club members in our community – they came out in force to support an event geared to their interests and needs.

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Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train, on the Power of Community Reading

By bicadmin | Published: November 21, 2013

We recently sat down with New York Times bestselling author, Christina Baker Kline. Her novel Orphan Train is about a young Irish immigrant who, as a child, is sent away from New York on a train that regularly transported unwanted and abandoned children from the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest. Moving between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, Orphan Train is a powerful tale of upheaval and resilience. The novel (which is the authors fifth work of fiction) was selected as a Target book club pick, has held steady on 5 national bestseller lists, and has just gone to print for the fifth time!

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In the Flesh or Between the Lines? The Benefits of Including the Author

By bicadmin | Published: November 21, 2013

As many all-campus and community reads organizers begin finalizing their decision for 2014 program titles, the account managers here at Books in Common often field an important question: why is it so critical for the author to participate, in person? We’ve worked with hundreds of event planners, on thousands of programs around the country. With nearly 100% agreement, the clients we work with say that having the author in the flesh dramatically increases the success of their programs.

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Also posted in All Campus Reads Programs, Garth Stein, Issue #4, Newsletters, The Art of Racing in the Rain | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Corban Addison and A Walk Across the Sun Spark Interest

By bicadmin | Published: November 11, 2013
Corban Addison at the Literary Feasts

This year, the Los Angeles Library Foundation hosted Corban Addison for a Literary Feast fundraising dinner. Read More »

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Film Version of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice to star Julianne Moore

By bicadmin | Published: November 6, 2013

Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice, about a college professor who faces the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, is currently in development and will begin shooting in New York mid-February. The American Film Market has just announced this morning that Julianne Moore, the Oscar nominated actress of “The Hours,” and “The End of the Affair,” will appear in the film as the title character. Still Alice spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and has been translated into over 25 languages. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the duo that also wrote and directed “The Last Robin Hood,” and “Quinceanera” are on board to direct the adaptation.

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Andrew McCarthy, author of The Longest Way Home, Interviews Paul Theroux: “I Hate Vacations”

By bicadmin | Published: November 1, 2013

Speaking with one of his favorite writers Paul Theroux, Andrew McCarthy, author of The Longest Way Home, talks candidly about the craft of travel writing, and the big difference between traveling and vacationing. Both men are avid journey-takers, and their definitions of what it means to be in a foreign place shed light on their work. When Andrew McCarthy asked Paul Theroux how he felt about traveling, Paul replied, “When I’m traveling, I feel small. You see how big the world is, how small you are, how you don’t really matter, how you can’t effect much change, you can’t bring something back.” Check out the wonderful interview here.

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Thor Hanson, author of Feathers, Wows in Minnesota

By bicadmin | Published: October 31, 2013
Thor Hanson speaks at the Bell Museum of Natural History

Earlier this month, the University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center hosted renowned biologist and speaker Dr. Thor Hanson for a talk on Feathers. Read More »

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Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Gray, Honored by Lithuanian Government

By bicadmin | Published: October 30, 2013

Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Grey, and Out of the Easy, was awarded Lithuania’s Cross of the Knight of the Order by the president of Lithuania in a ceremony last month at the Presidential Palace in Vilnius.

The honor was bestowed on Sepetys in recognition for her novel Between Shades of Gray, which takes as its subject the tragic story of fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas who is deported from Lithuania to Siberia in 1941 with her mother and younger brother. Sepetys has toured internationally for three years, presenting the novel and associated history in dozens of countries. The President commended “her continued global work sharing the little-known history of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.” Between Shades of Gray has been published in 43 countries and 26 languages.

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Koethi Zan’s The Never List Adapted for Television

By bicadmin | Published: October 23, 2013

Koethi Zan’s international best-seller The Never List – a fast-paced novel about four kidnapped girls – will be adapted for television by CBS. Author-screenwriter AM Holmes (The End of Alice, The L Word) will pen the script, with Koethi Zan herself on board as a supervising producer. Koethi Zan, a former senior VP and deputy general counsel at MTV, found the inspiration for the book in the stories of captivity survivors: “These women have suffered through the absolute worst thing I can imagine and every one of them has demonstrated incredible strength in the wake of such trauma.”

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