Dean's away on spring break so I get to pen this week's Dispatches and I promise there will be no talk about golf.
Most of the Islandport chatter this week is about John Ford's wonderful collection of stories, "Suddenly the Cider Didn't Taste So Good." This past weekend, John was profiled in the Maine Sunday Telegram and the Kennebec Journal, and John Holyoke reviewed the book in the Bangor Daily News, calling it, "an entertaining book that will leave readers chuckling, speechless or both" and says readers will gobble up his stories and clamor for more. Let's hope so! The book is available for pre-order and will ship next week ... It feels like it's conference season. Last week librarians from across Maine gathered at the annual Reading Round-Up. Several Islandport authors took part in panels, workshops and awards presentations. Congratulations to all the Lupine, Chickadee, Katahdin, and Maine State Book Award winners. Award-winning author Lynn Plourde has the best set of photos we've seen from the event posted on her Facebook page. Did we mention that Sarah Thomson's Mercy: The Last New England Vampire is on the 2012-13 MSBA list? Why yes, I think we did! ... This week, the New England branch of the Society of Book Writers and Illustrators has its annual conference in Springfield, MA, and I'll be there doing manuscript critiques and generally hobnobbing ... on the foreign front, we're thrilled to announce that Dahlov Ipcar's The Little Fisherman (written by Margaret Wise Brown) will soon be available to readers in Japan! This is the first project we've worked on with our new partners at Transatlantic Literary Agency and we could not be happier for Dahlov ... I thought that after the National Book Awards fiasco, things couldn't get worse, but the Pulitzer announcement that no fiction was worthy of an award proved me wrong. When I think of all the fantastic, ground-breaking fiction that I read last year, it just makes me sad. Shall we nominate and vote for our own award-winners? Post your un-Pulitzer-worthy fiction nomination in the Comments below ... and enjoy the freakish high temperatures in the New England area today.
Saturday, April 21, is Dean's birthday. Happy birthday, boss!
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