Shelf Life
Reading for votes
The Portsmouth Literary Festival has a new twist this year: New Hampshire's first "Literary Idol" contest. Ten writers will take to the stage to perform their best 500-word piece of fiction before a live audience and a panel of judges.
The festival's headliner is writer Tom Perrotta, author of "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher." A punk-rock-poetry workshop for teenagers and a tour of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, where Ogden Nash used to write, are also part of the festivities Oct. 23-25. Details at www.nhwritersproject.org.
Ten and counting
Newtonville Books is plugged in to the local scene, hosting launch parties for literary journals, forums with creative-writing professors, and appearances by up-and-coming as well as established novelists. Today, the Newton store celebrates its 10th anniversary with a host of readings and children's activities. The party begins at noon with a soup tasting. Details at www.newtonvillebooks.com.
A legend and a lake
Over the past 400 years, French explorer Samuel de Champlain's image has been subject to change. He's been revered; he's been reviled. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer offers a sweeping reappraisal in "Champlain's Dream: The European Founding of North America" (Simon & Schuster). (See our review on the previous page.)
Champlain founded Quebec and led the first permanent French settlements in North America. A principled man, he had a petty side and a troubled personal life. He was the first European to explore territory that now composes five US states and six Canadian provinces, including the lake bordering New York, Vermont, and Quebec that bears his name.
In Champlain's day, deer and bear swam across Lake Champlain to the islands. Today the lake - covering 425 square miles - faces a number of ecological challenges, as described in the new book "Lake Champlain: A Natural History," by Mike Winslow. An environmental scientist, Winslow reports on recent research as well as his own exploration of the lake in the book, published by the Lake Champlain Committee/Images From the Past.
Pressing issues
Yale University Press is celebrating its centennial with - what else? - a book. It commissioned bibliophile Nicholas A. Basbanes to write "A World of Letters," being published next week.
Sandwiched inside a chronicle of internal affairs are the stories behind Yale bestsellers, such as "The Lonely Crowd," by David Riesman, published in 1950. As Basbanes notes, critic Lionel Trilling suggested in an essay about the book "that social science might replace fiction as a vehicle for understanding society." To date, 1.5 million copies of "The Lonely Crowd" have been sold.
The events leading up to the publication in 1956 of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" amounted to a family drama. There were broken promises and dropped lines about drugs and drinking that were restored for later editions.
Coming out
Pick of the week
Kathryn Fabiani of R. J. Julia Booksellers, in Madison, Conn., recommends "Serena: A Novel," by Ron Rash (Ecco): "Buckle your seatbelts, folks, you are in for an amazing ride. Set in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina during the Depression, this incredible novel is about love, greed, revenge, and survival - a story told in epic proportions, complete with a Greek chorus of lumberjacks."
Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com. 