Books

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

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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,

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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

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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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Arts

Revisiting Things Fall Apart: A Fiftieth-Year Retrospective

In 1958 Chinua Achebe, a young African broadcast journalist, published his first novel, Things Fall Apart, a tender portrait of a "strong man" in an Ibo village in Nigeria whose orderly world irreparably unravels when Christian missionaries arrive.  Since its publication, Achebe's novel has sold over

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Arts

One Chimp's Life: A Gripping Tale

You don't have to be an animal lover like the East Chatham author Elizabeth Hess to find her new book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human absorbing.  You don't even have to care much about the merits of the scientific experiment that brought Nim

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Arts

The Librarian's List

Who: Erica Joncyk Where: The David M. Hunt Memorial Library in Falls Village, CT, which opened on Main Street in 1891. Originally built as a private school, it functioned as a combination grammar school and library for many years. It holds a popular sale of slightly tattered new books on

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