Books

Arts

A Conversation with "House of Cards" Author William D. Cohan

Author William D. Cohan, our neighbor in Columbia County, was an investment banker for 17 years before he left Wall Street and wrote his first best-seller, The Last Tycoons.  On Saturday evening, March 28, he will be at the Hammertown Barn in Pine Plains to talk about his latest book,

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Arts

Nostalgia Now: "Barns of the Berkshires"

Stephen Donaldson is a photographer who thinks like a cultural anthropologist. His latest book, Barns of the Berkshires (Schiffer Publishing, $24.95), not only documents a significant and vanishing part of our rural landscape but also sounds the alarm for saving barns before it's too late. "The

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Arts

Photographer Annie Leibovitz Signs New Book

The difference between great photographers and the rest of us is that for them life occurs in slow motion and without a distracting sound tract, affording them plenty of mental space and time to appraise a scene, consider camera angles, change lenses, and adjust f-stops, while the rest of us

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Arts

A Serious Conversation About "Scrapbooks: An American History" with Jessica Helfand

When I met Jessica Helfand five or six years ago, I was dumbstruck when she told me that one of the joys of having moved full-time to Falls Village from New York City was having more time to work. (I thought country life was all about recreation, but I'

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Arts

Celebrity Book Signings at Hammertown and Privet House

A bona fide celebrity—not just someone who is accomplished or has a well-known name—is a person whom you've always wanted to see in the flesh to determine whether the image you have from magazines and television is accurate.  Both Mario Batali, the restaurateur and Food Network

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Arts

6th Annual Local Authors Day in Sheffield

If you have any lingering doubts that our region has more than its fair share of writers in residence, just take a look at the list (below) of 49 authors and illustrators who will be signing books in Sheffield on Saturday, November 1, at the 6th annual Bushnell-Sage Library'

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Arts

Susan Orlean Discovers That It's A Small World After All

Susan Orlean, the esteemed New Yorker staff writer, never expected that a publisher would approach her about turning her 1996 "Shouts & Murmurs" piece called "Shiftless Little Loafers" into a sweet children's book retitled Lazy Little Loafers. "I was surprised," she says

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Arts

If It's Tuesday, This Must be Tyringham

It's easy to take our region's rich history for granted, because 18th century houses and 19th century churches are daily sightings for most of us. But how often do we stop to explore the interior architecture of that house of worship we've driven by

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Arts

Talking about China in the Berkshires; Simon Winchester at Home

Simon Winchester, the Oxford-trained geologist turned bestselling author, became renowned with his inspired much-touted The Professor And the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and almost equally praised for Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883. The latest of this

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Arts

Saturday At Spencertown Academy: Sloane Shelton as Eudora Welty

''There's a saying around here,'' the fiction writer Eudora Welty once said. ''If you hear it, tell it.'' "Around here," was Jackson, Mississippi, where Welty heard everything: the comedy and music in the language, the evasions, self-deceptions, and

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Arts

Books: The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Women of a certain age will recall the famous "click" moment, identified and immortalized in 1971 by Jane O'Reilly in the preview issue of Ms. magazine--that nano-second in which a woman becomes a feminist, invariably as a reaction to a stinging sexist insult.  But perhaps less

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Arts

Bunny and Me

It's rare that the author of a coffee table book on interior design is invited to give readings at public libraries, so it seems noteworthy that Bunny Williams had two readings scheduled at Litchfield County libraries this month.  (If you missed her appearance at the Scoville Memorial Library

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