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CELEBRITIES
AUTHORS NEWS
 Sex
and the Saudi
New novel The Girls of Riyadh gets mixed
reaction in the Arab country
Photo: First-time
Saudi author Rajaa al-Sanie, 24, has caused a firestorm in the Arab
country with her novel The Girls of Riyadh.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – It’s hardly
Sex and the City, but by Saudi standards The Girls of
Riyadh is a bombshell. The fictional tale of the loves, dreams
and disappointments of four young women in the capital has, not
surprisingly, drawn criticism in a country where women are not
supposed to date or have a love life until married. More striking,
however, is the degree of support being voiced for 24-year-old
author Rajaa al-Sanie and her first novel. In the novel, Sadeem's
husband divorces her because she's too sexually bold for his liking.
Qamra discovers soon after her wedding that her husband is in love
with a Japanese woman. Mashael's boyfriend cannot marry her because
her mother is American. Only Lamis finds true and lasting love.
The Girls of Riyadh was published in September in Lebanon, the
most liberal of Arab countries, and is going into its third
printing. In Saudi Arabia, where the sexes are strictly segregated,
authorities haven't decided whether to approve its sale, but pirated
editions are circulating in photocopy form. Author Mariam
Abdel-Karim al-Bukhari, writing in the newspaper Al Riyadh,
said she hasn't read the book but nonetheless believes the title “is
hurtful to the girls in our country.” She wants al-Sanie to change
it, or “issue an apology to the girls of Riyadh.” But glowing praise
comes from Ghazi al-Qusaibi, a renowned Saudi author who is also the
kingdom's labour minister. He calls it “a work that deserves to be
read. I expect a lot from this author.” Educator Hussah al-Ghanem
agrees. “I support her 100 per cent,” she said. “People should talk
about the positive and negative aspects of their society.” Al-Sanie,
fresh out of dental school, is a petite brunette who wears an
Islamic head scarf, like virtually all Saudi women. She says a few
of al-Sanie's friends have cut her off because “They don't want to
hurt their marriage prospects by associating with a bold friend.”
Her biggest supporter is her family. “Before the book was
published, I asked Rajaa, ‘Are you willing to go the extra mile for
this?’” said her brother, Ahmed. “She's not married yet, and society
doesn't forgive or forget.” The book, which isn't available in
English, is told in the form of weekly e-mails from a female
narrator to Internet subscribers in Saudi Arabia, portrays four
women whose stories are based on true-life ones that al-Sanie says
she has heard at weddings, in school and at women's gatherings. Many
in the Arab world are comparing it to Sex and the City,
the TV series about four young women in New York City, though there
is so sex in The Girls of Riyadh, only emotions. The novel
opens with Qamra marrying Rashed in a lavish ceremony, having
already been advised by her ultra-conservative mother not to
consummate her marriage on her wedding night lest she be judged
“easy.” The couple moves to the United States, only for Qamra to
discover that Rashed married her to appease his parents, who
wouldn't let him marry his real love, a Japanese woman. Rashed soon
divorces Qamra and sends her home pregnant. To protect its
reputation, her family bans her from returning to college or going
out much with her girlfriends. Meanwhile, Sadeem sleeps with Walid
after their marriage contract is signed but before she moves in with
him. Shocked at her “boldness” and interest in sex, Walid divorces
her. She develops a phone relationship with a Saudi man and would
like him for a husband, but being a divorcee makes that impossible
and she ends up marrying a cousin. Mashael is the half-American who
once broke the ban against women driving by dressing as a man,
renting a car and driving her girlfriends around the city. She and
her boyfriend, Faisal, meet at a mall and fall in love but don't
marry because his mother doesn't want a half-American for a
daughter-in-law. And finally there's Lamis, who marries Nizar and
finds happiness because unlike the other three women, she has let
her head govern her heart and made sure he is right for her. Al-Sanie
says she wrote the book to highlight issues that society denies. “I
didn't distort the country's reputation. I wrote about humanity
here,” she said. “I wanted to show that both men and women are
victims of society.” Al-Sanie says that among many readers who have
e-mailed her is a man who got the book from his divorced daughter.
“He told me it made him cry and made him realize what women go
through,” she said. “He decided that his daughter will not live the
traditional life of a divorcee.”
Maximillien de Lafayette's review of Alexandra
Bruce's most recent book
 Alexandra
Bruce's "BEYOND THE SECRET": Powerful and Captivating
Photo: Alexandra Bruce, a
world-class author.
Alexandra Bruce is known for
her discussions on metaphysics, quantum physics, The Montauk Mythos,
Tibetan vampirism, and UFOs. But her book "Beyond The Secret"
explores different dimensions. The book is a rainbow of intelligent
ideas, and in-depth visions of secrets that surround our life,
ranging from technology and religion to society and science.
Alexandra Bruce delivered a formidable book; a prism reflecting the
most important thoughts and socio-cultural concepts in the history
of humanity, and perhaps beyond...Her narrative style is clear,
crisp and rich. Although the core of the book flirts with
philosophical and sometimes metaphysical aspects of the human
persona and fabric, the essence of the book remains a pragmatic
guide to success, global understanding of the world that surrounds
us at so many levels. Needless to say, Alexandra Bruce's exploration
of empowered wealth, financial assets, civic assets blended
with with an astonishing varieties of laws governing attraction,
randomness, business and reality transmute her book into one
of the most indispensable books of the decade. "Beyond the Secret"
is a gem. Bruce's readers will be surrounded by a fresh breeze
of happiness and intelligent tranquility. Buy the book. You will
treasure it for years to come. Rating: 5 stars out of five.- By
Maximillien de Lafayette
Alan Alda: "I
think the guy who winds up at the end of the book would say,
'Destiny is just what happens."
Alan Alda titled his new book
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed -- and Other Things I've Learned. But
rest assured he didn't write it as a guide for self-improvement. He
doesn't aim to be your guru. "I tried to tell as good a story as I
could," he sums up. The resulting narrative, at 224 pages, is as
lean as its author, and as engaging, and as flush with ideas and
observations. "There are things that were very, very difficult to
put into words," says Alda, at 69 an entertainment veteran actor who
had written numerous screenplays but never a book. "That was what I
had the most fun with - the things that don't want to go into words.
"But the hardest part was how to take a life and make it one simple
story, not just a bunch of anecdotes. I didn't like the idea of
writing a memoir or an autobiography. I only put in stuff that moved
the story forward." The story: One man's advancement toward
accepting the uncertainties of life. Letting go, notes Alda, is a
drawn-out process, "so you don't just decide to do it. You have to
creep up on it. Practice it. Get used to it. "I think the guy who
winds up at the end of the book would say, 'Destiny is just what
happens. " Alda should know. A lot has happened for that guy this
year. He got an Oscar nomination for his role in Martin Scorsese's
The Aviator, a Tony nomination for his Broadway performance in David
Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, and an Emmy nomination for The West
Wing, in which he plays flinty Republican presidential hopeful
Arnold Vinick. He continues this season on the NBC political drama,
and, for its Nov. 6 episode, Sen. Vinick will square off against the
Democrat (Jimmy Smits) in a debate aired live. Which candidate will
succeed President Bartlet (series star Martin Sheen) by season's
end? " I wouldn't spoil the surprise even if I knew," Alda replies
when pressed for details about his contractual commitment to the
series. But then, flashing his incandescent grin, he pledges to
remain "as long as necessary to turn this great country around."
When he isn't shuttling to Los Angeles to shoot the series, Alda
leaves his Long Island home to hit the campaign trail for Never Have
Your Dog Stuffed. Its first sentence establishes the book's
matter-of-fact, often darkly witty tone. "My mother didn't try to
stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of
oddness before that," Alda writes. He was the son of a mentally ill
mother and an actor father, Robert Alda, who was subject to the
vagaries of show business during a career that ranged from the
hardscrabble vaudeville circuit to Broadway in the original
production of Guys and Dolls. All in all, it was a dizzying
childhood for Alan. But by age nine, he had decided he would be an
actor, too, setting the stage for his push-pull life of embracing
make-believe while defiantly inquiring into how things really are.
He is a man in love with facts and verifiable truth (his decade as
the gung-ho host of Scientific American Frontiers makes that clear).
But he has also studied what it means to yield control to forces
beyond reason.
 He
had an early brush with that as a boy when his dog died suddenly and
his dad, in a misguided attempt to console him, had the creature
stuffed. "Stuffing your dog," Alda writes, "is more than what
happens when you take a dead body and turn it into a souvenir. It's
also what happens when you hold on to any living moment longer than
it wants you to." Of course, that experience didn't stop him from
sending away for a mail-order course in taxidermy a few years later.
"There was a lot of stuff in there, and most of it was gooey," he
found before abandoning his effort to preserve an owl's carcass. At
21, Alda wed a pretty clarinetist named Arlene, with whom he soon
had three daughters (and now shares seven grandchildren they dote
on). But the family's early years were marked by false starts and
dead ends in his drive to find acting success. In his mid-30s, he
struck gold as Dr. Hawkeye Pierce in the beloved comedy M*A*S*H,
whose finale after 11 seasons -- airing on Feb. 28, 1983 -- was seen
by nearly 106 million viewers and remains the highest-rated telecast
in TV history. But rather than playing doctor two years ago, Alda
was on the receiving end of emergency surgery for an intestinal
obstruction while in Chile doing a segment for Scientific American
Frontiers. It was an operation with which he was professionally
acquainted, he writes -- although, as Hawkeye, "all I operated on
was a piece of foam rubber." He came through the procedure OK, and
"when I woke up," he says now, savouring the memory, "was I glad to
be there! I was almost manic about being alive. "Then I started
going back over my whole life, and I began to realize how connected
the whole part of my early life was to this euphoria I was feeling.
I really did want to understand everything that went before, and see
what I could learn from it." Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is the
outcome -- Alda's learning process deftly put in story form;
reflections galore, but no how-to advice. "Letting somebody else
tell me what to think is a way of stuffing the dog," he says with a
laugh. "My telling somebody else what to think is the same
thing."-F. More
Meet Indigo's real youth book wizards
Junior advisory board makes real, big-budget
decisions on what gets onto shelves
The Million-Dollar Man is small potatoes. Meet
Canada's $110-million teenagers. One of the biggest business stories
this year has been the skyrocketing sales of books in children's and
young adult categories, which account for a full 14 per cent of the
$785.5 million in annual sales at Indigo Books -- the country's
largest book retailer. What you may not know is 10 teen bookworms
help determine which authors get a piece of that nine-figure pie,
empowered to make or break any would-be Harry Potter before it ever
hits store shelves. Given exclusive access to pre-release books, the
hand-picked members of Indigo's junior advisory board -- five of
whom were announced this month, five of whom are "emeritus" advisers
from 2004 -- liaise with the company's buyers throughout the year to
help steer them toward the best bets in new youth titles. "Our picks
and our opinions on books do influence not only how many copies are
bought by the store, but also if they're (bought) at all," says
Riley Tickles, a 14-year-old emeritus adviser from Calgary. "It has
been one of the best experiences of my life so far." According to
Heather Reisman, chief executive at Indigo, the company wouldn't
snub a novel that deserved exposure. But if the junior advisory
board members are all holding their noses, she says: "the difference
in the amount of exposure and promotion (the book gets) can be quite
significant." Last year, for example, Reisman says a particular
title -- which came "highly, highly touted" by its publisher as the
next big thing -- was only judged lukewarm by Indigo's senior
reviewers. When the junior advisory board also gave it a collective
thumbs-down, the book was taken off the fast track.
 "Their
recommendations are taken very seriously," she says. "So instead of
doing a big buy on that book, we just tested it in a number of
stores. It didn't do well." Less than a month into his new gig,
15-year-old adviser Bobby Hanson is already enjoying the sense of
importance that comes with the position. "We represent the greater
body of youth, so our opinions are heard by the executives and the
buyers and what not," says Hanson, a Vancouver teen who was reading
encyclopedias when he was just four years old. "I'm pretty sure we
have fairly large power." Also joining the advisory panel this month
are Victoria's Kristie Foreman, 13, Katie Hillman, 16, from Halifax,
Toronto's Madeleine Cummings, 14, and Adam Moscoe, 13, of Ottawa.
Continuing emeritus advisers include Hannah Drew, 15, from London,
Ont., Aaron Martin, 12, of Surrey, B.C., Katrina Sklepowich, 15,
from Winnipeg, and Charlottetown's Megan Stewart, 17. Indigo's
junior advisory board, in its second year of operation, is what a
focus group would look like on steroids. The kids have more
influence, a greater hand in the business, and get more compensation
for their time -- in this case, a $1,000 gift card, an iPod Mini, a
trip to Toronto and their own personalized section in Chapters and
Indigo stores across the country. A youth-oriented retail website is
also in the works to help meet the needs of this growing audience.
This year, retail of kids books is up 37.6 per cent, with the
biggest growth showing up in the nine- to 16-age segment. Remove
Harry Potter from the equation and sales in that category are still
up an impressive 21 per cent. "There isn't any other (bookseller) in
Canada doing this. In the world, nobody is doing this," says Reisman.
"Kids don't necessarily make the best book critics, but they are the
best able to reflect what their peers are thinking. When you're 13,
you know what it feels like to be 13." Debi Andrus, assistant
professor at the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of
Business, says rival companies would be smart to take notes. "One of
the problems with a number of retailers whose target is young people
is that they often try to put themselves into the shoes of (teens)
rather than listening to them," she says. "(Reisman) is known for
doing things differently. Once again, she has found a way to include
the voice of a significant audience in her decision making." - M.
Harris.
Iconic Shakespeare portrait likely not him
An Elizabethan portrait thought by many to depict
the young William Shakespeare is not the bard, experts at the
National Portrait Gallery have concluded.
The Grafton portrait, which shows a dark-haired,
high-browed young man in a rich scarlet jacket, has appeared on the
cover of books about the writer. Gallery experts dated the painting
to 1588, when Shakespeare was 24 -- the age given by an inscription
on the picture for its subject. But they said Friday that there was
no other evidence to suggest the portrait, owned by the University
of Manchester, was of the playwright. Curator Tarnya Cooper said it
was unlikely Shakespeare, then a young actor and writer, would have
been able to afford a garment as expensive as the one in the
painting. "We believe that Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon
following the birth of twins in 1585," Cooper said. "One possibility
is that he joined a travelling theatre troupe and it is very
unlikely that in 1588, Shakespeare would have been able to afford a
costume of this type." Cooper said the painting had helped nurture
the image of a sensitive, brooding young poet popularized by the
film Shakespeare in Love -- "a beautiful young man with a sensitive
and passionate face, of a character with an incredible emotional
range." Painted in oils on an oak panel by an anonymous artist, the
Grafton Portrait is named for one of the Dukes of Grafton, who is
said to have owned it. The gallery is restoring and authenticating
three portraits purportedly of Shakespeare in preparation for its
Searching for Shakespeare exhibition next year. Using x-rays,
ultraviolet light, microphotography and paint sampling tests,
scholars at the gallery concluded in April that one of the
best-known Shakespeare portraits -- the so-called Flower portrait
owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company -- was also a fake.
Scientific analysis revealed the painting dated from the 19th
century. Next, experts will examine the Chandos portrait, which is
in the gallery's own collection. Only two likenesses of Shakespeare
are widely accepted as authentic: a bust on his tomb in Stratford's
Holy Trinity Church and an engraving used as a frontispiece to the
Folio edition of his plays in 1623.
Da Vinci publisher in court case
Two authors are
launching a High Court action against the publishers of The Da Vinci
Code, which they say infringes upon their ideas.
Photo: The Da Vinci Code has made author Dan Brown a household
name.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing
Random House, claiming the bestseller lifts from their 1982 book The
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. A High Court hearing will be held
next week, followed by a trial next year. Random House was
unavailable for comment on the claim that Brown stole the idea that
Jesus had a child.
A spokeswoman for Baigent and Leigh said the authors
had been struck by alleged similarities to their history book. She
said: "The basis of their case is theft of intellectual property.
"There are huge chunks of The Da Vinci Code which they say is lifted
from their book." The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was recently
reissued through Century, part of the Random House group. It
features "cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the
Knights Templar" and links them to "a dynasty of obscure French
kings" and the Holy Grail. It also claims that Jesus and Mary
Magdalene married and had a child together.
Photo: Audrey Tautou will co-star in the film, due out next year.
The Da Vinci Code, derided by critics and the
subject of furious religious debate, won best book at this year's
British Book Awards. The novel sees an art historian follow a trail
of codes and puzzles to explore claims that Jesus and Mary's
bloodline survives to this day. A film is being made by director Ron
Howard and starring Tom Hanks. Baigent and Leigh wrote their book
with a third author, Henry Lincoln, who is not taking part in the
legal action due to ill-health. In August, Brown won a court ruling
in New York against writer Lewis Perdue, who claimed The Da Vinci
Code plagiarised elements of two of his novels, Daughter of God,
published in 2000 and 1983's The Da Vinci Legacy. Perdue sought to
block future distribution of the book and forthcoming film, as well
as $150m (£84m) in damages, but the judge said any similarity was
based on "unprotectable ideas".
Buffett's secrets to be revealed
Publisher Bantam Dell has won a bidding war
for a biography of 75-year-old billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Photo: Warren Buffett likes to play bridge and the ukulele.
It is the first time a biography will have be
written with his co-operation, and deal is worth $7m (£4m), AP says.
Mr Buffett, known as the Sage of Omaha, is the world's second
richest man, said by Forbes to be worth $40bn (£22.6bn). The book,
which will focus on his investment strategy, is likely to be called
The Snowball: How Warren Buffett Collected Friends, Wisdom and
Wealth.
The book will be written by Alice Schroeder, formerly
an analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she first came into contact with
Mr Buffett. Although it is claimed it will reveal the secrets of his
successful investment strategy, the contract was negotiated with the
writer, not with the investment star famous for his homespun style.
"Our deal is with her. She is the author," Bantam president and
publisher Irwyn Applebaum told AP through spokeswoman Barbara Burg.
The returns Mr Buffett has generated have won him a loyal investor
base and turned many of his followers into multi-millionaires. Had
you given Mr Buffett $10,000 in 1965, by 1999 that nest egg would
have been worth more than $50m. In 1956 Mr Buffett built a
partnership of four relatives and three close friends - he now
controls a holding company worth $100bn (£56.7bn). Shares in his
investment firm Berkshire Hathaway - which owns insurance, soft
drink, confectionery, furniture, restaurant and carpet firms - are
currently trading at $83,000 each. Mr Buffett is not one for fads
and has built his investment empire on the maxim that it is better
to identify a good investment and hold it for a long time, rather
than jump in and out of positions. The world's second-richest person
behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, he famously sat out the whole
internet boom. Dell says the new book will be based on the
"thousands of hours" the writer spent with Mr Buffett and on
"unprecedented access to his files, friends and associates".
Warren Buffett wears sweatshirts in spare time. He enjoys burgers,
fries and cola. He plays bridge and ukulele. He is a former night
school teacher.
Beat goes
on for Ginsberg's Howl
SAN FRANCISCO- In the years
after he wrote Howl, Allen Ginsberg alternately described the poem
as a song of spiritual liberation, a homage to art, an ode to gay
love and a lament for his mentally ill mother. The Beat poet who
defined his times with the salvo, "I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness," gave perhaps the most adroit
explanation, however, upon publication of the original facsimile
edition of the tour de force that had launched his career more
than three decades earlier. Howl, he advised readers in his
preface, was meant to be an "emotional time bomb that would
continue exploding." With nearly one million copies in print, it
is one of the most widely read poems of the 20th century. Still,
critics disagree about the place Ginsberg's best-known work holds
in American letters. But even its detractors acknowledge that his
provocative assault on the Cold War and conformity roared across
the cultural landscape in a way that continues to resonate a
half-century after its storied debut at a San Francisco art
gallery. Ginsberg first publicly read Howl as a work-in-progress
at a wine-soaked gathering on Oct. 7, 1955 - a date that holds as
much meaning for followers of the Beats as Bloomsday, June 16,
does for fans of James Joyce's Ulysses. The Six Gallery reading,
as it has since become known, preceded by a year the poem's
publication and the moral outrage provoked by its defence of
homosexuality and drug use. Admirers regard the reading as a
turning point that took poetry out of the Ivory Tower - creating
space for dissent and presaging the youthful rebellion that
inspired folk music, sexually explicit performance art and more
recently, poetry slams. "Poets now read all over the place, but at
that time they didn't - if they were famous, they maybe read at
the Museum of Modern Art," said Jonah Raskin, author of American
Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat
Generation. At 29, relatively new to San Francisco and bearing the
psychic scars that had landed him in two mental hospitals,
Ginsberg was the last and least-known in the five-poet lineup. As
legend has it, his raw, intensely personal evocation of desperate
souls "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged
off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts" stole the night. His
friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at
the performance. "Scores of people stood around the darkened
gallery straining to hear every word," Kerouac recalled afterward.
"Everyone was yelling, 'Go! Go! Go!' " Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, also heard
Ginsberg read that night
The next day, he sent Ginsberg a
telegram asking to see the manuscript of what was then Part 1 of
what would grow to a three-part epic. "I greet you at the
beginning of a great career," Ferlinghetti wrote, intentionally
echoing a line Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman after
reading Leaves of Grass. While Howl and Other Poems was being
prepared for publication, Ginsberg and other Beat poets took their
show on the road, performing up and down the West Coast. It wasn't
until spring 1957, after San Francisco police arrested
Ferlinghetti and the manager of City Lights, Shigeyoshi Murao, on
charges of selling obscene material, that the book became a symbol
of the social tensions Ginsberg sought to expose. With help from
the American Civil Liberties Union, they were acquitted after a
highly publicized trial, and the judge's ruling established a
legal standard for publishing controversial books of "redeeming
social importance." Judge Clayton Horn agreed with the defence
that the section of the poem Ginsberg read at Six Gallery
"presents a picture of a nightmare world." Members of the Academy
of American Poets still debate whether Howl has only had legs
because of its early notoriety, but there is no denying its
"profound influence on the course of American poetry," said Tree
Swenson, the academy's executive director. Last weekend, more than
400 people crowded into the San Francisco Public Library
auditorium to hear actor Peter Coyote and seven poets recite Howl
to the accompaniment of a jazz duo. Stanford University, home to
Ginsberg's papers, is holding five Beat Mondays with lectures
about the poem. City Lights will publish a fully annotated Golden
Anniversary edition of Howl and Other Poems next year. Farrar
Straus & Giroux is preparing a collection of essays by writers
such as Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne
Merkin, Rick Moody and Robert Pinsky called The Poem That Changed
America. A feature-length documentary, Howl: The Movie, is also in
the works. Ginsberg died in 1997 at age 70, eight days after he
was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. A tireless promoter of
his own work who enjoyed performing publicly until the end of his
life, he would no doubt enjoy the attention Howl still generates
and be the first to point out its continued relevance in an
America struggling with terrorism and the war in Iraq. "We are in
an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot
Act and where people are . . . being intimidated not to speak
about what we should be speaking about," said Gerald Nicosia,
author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. "If
you substitute terrorism for communism, we are getting the same
rhetoric." By Lisa Lef
Potter
sales surpass 300 million: agent
LONDON- Global sales of Harry Potter books have
surpassed 300 million, the agent for author J.K. Rowling said
Tuesday. Agent Christopher Little said the series reached the
milestone following the publication of Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince, the sixth volume about the schoolboy wizard.
Potter books have now been translated into 63 languages, most
recently Farsi.
THE
GODDARD RIVERSIDE NEW YORK BOOK FAIR
The
19TH ANNUAL
NEW
YORK
BOOK FAIR
is Saturday, November 19th, from
9AM-5PM
and Sunday, November 20th, from
11AM-6PM
@
593 Columbus Avenue
@
88th Street.
The Book Fair brings
together members of the publishing industry, local businesses and
all New Yorkers for a weekend-long, fun-filled event that benefits
the
Goddard
Riverside
Community Center,
the
West Side's
settlement house that has served the community for 110 years. The
Book Fair raises money for programs that help
New York City
youth, older adults, and the homeless. Thanks to volunteers and
in-kind contributions, more than 85 cents out of every dollar
raised goes directly into Goddard Riverside's 22 human service
programs at 16 sites on the West Side of Manhattan and in
Harlem.
There are several
exciting events that are part of the Goddard Riverside New York
Book Fair:
"MEET THE AUTHOR" DINNERS KICK OFF THE BOOK FAIR ON NOVEMBER 11:
Ved Mehta, Jeffrey
Toobin, Donald E. Westlake, Jane E. Brody, David Baldacci, Mary
Gordon, Rona Jaffe, Paul Krugman, Roy Blount, Jr. and many others
dine in homes around the city to support Goddard's cause. On
November 11th, leading up to the actual Book Fair, participants
are offered the opportunity to attend dinners with their favorite
authors. These casual and intimate dinners are held in private
homes around the city on the 11th. For additional information on
the Meet-the Author Dinners,
please contact Annette Pousson at 212-873 6600.
THE
BOOK BASH ON NOVEMBER 18:
At the
Book Bash, held on
Friday, November 18th from 6:30-9:30 PM @ the Goddard Riverside
Community Center (593 Columbus Avenue @ 88th Street),
nine famous West Side restaurants-Kitchen 82, Ono, Town, Ouest & 'Cesca,
Fish, Butter, Park Avenue Café and Café Gray--will be serving up
their signature dishes, along with platters from Ideal Cheese and
savory pasties by Du Four. An auction will offer trips, dinners,
tickets to cultural and sporting events, as well as professional
services from private catering to massages and health club
memberships. Those attending this event can shop for the best
books at 50% off before the weekend crowd arrives. Tickets are
$125 in advance and $150 at the door. For more information,
e-mail Ms. Coxe at
Elizabeth.Coxe@stmartins.com
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