Category Archives: Authors

Oh My God! This is Huge!

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Featured imageAnyone who ever went to high school in the United States and maybe outside the US has read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  It’s considered an American Lit classic and despite it’s success it’s Miss Lee’s only book.  That is until now.  HarperCollins today announced that Miss Lee will publish her first her book in over 50 years Like OMG!  This is amazing.  Not only is it a new book but it’s a sequel. Go Set a Watchmen follows an Adult Scout as she comes cack to Maycomb, Alambama.

The book is set during the mid-1950s, some 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus and is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood

This is awesome!  It turns out that Go Set a Watchmen is actually Miss Lee’s first book.  When she showed it to her editor, the editor said she should write about a young Scout, so she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird instead.  She thought the manuscript was other destroyed or lost.  Surprise! It was not.

Well it might not be all good news.  HarperCollins only has contact with Miss Lee through her Lawyer and Literary Agent so there are questions about whether Miss Lee has really signed off on this.  It would be sad if that was true and I hope that it is not true.  I’m not sure if this is good or not but for now I am going to be excited about the new release and will wait patiently for July 14.

Ola!

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I would like to diverge a minute from our regularly scheduled broadcasts of discussion of published works to rep for a friend doing some awesome work.

I spent much of my summer at the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang for short) which is a biennial summer language program for linguists, language revitalization experts and speakers of any and all languages. While at CoLang I met an awesome woman named Hali Dardar, who was working with Houma Language Project. Houma is a language of Lousiana, it is endangered, and the speakers are looking for ways to change that for the better. At CoLang, Hali put together the first draft of an excellent guide for language investigation, specifically, language investigation in small groups with some native speakers and some learners. Since this summer she has continued to work on it and it now has a kickstarter! This book that she has put together is a guide to language discovery for small groups. If you, or anyone you know, is interested in practical language acquisition in small groups working with native speakers, I recommend you check this out!

Or, if you yourself are interested in what linguists do when they go to the field, you may want to check it out, too. A mere 15 bucks would get you a copy of the book!

that time I corrected a friend of a friend on social media

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This is a thing of beauty. Not only because I love The Vampire Diaries and read them cover to cover as soon as I discovered them in seventh grade. But, also because Dylan O’Brien is my favorite maze-runnin’ werewolf’s bestie.

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But, here’s the thing: I keep seeing this where people have commented, “Anne Rice had me from page one!
I love Anne Rice! These books are the best!” The implication being that Anne Rice wrote TVD. Great! Super! Good for you! I’m glad you love Anne Rice! She wrote Interview with a Vampire! L.J. Smith wrote The Vampire Diaries.

I know there are a lot of vampires around, but please let us endeavor to get the classics right.

Happy Halloween!