Blog hold music

by kelly on June 29, 2010
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We are in the midst of moving. While the blog is on hold, take a look at some of these beautiful book covers. Which ones are your favorites?

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Contemporary people: Not all jerks

by kelly on June 25, 2010
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As I researched the time period that became the setting for The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, I found myself (embarrassingly) surprised by how much people living then were just like people living now. I’m not sure why that surprised me.

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My Antonia update

by kelly on June 22, 2010
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I posted recently about reading My Antonia for the first time. As Kelly Wimmer pointed out, I have, indeed, developed a a new fear of horse-drawn sleighs.

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Meow!

by kelly on June 20, 2010
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Long-time high school English teacher Rondi Aastrup has such a place in her heart for “Little Women” that she named one of her furry friends Teddy, and the other Louisa May!

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#grayfail

by kelly on June 18, 2010
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It’s true–The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is featured on O Magazine’s Summer Reading List for 2010! If there was ever a time for an OMG, this is it. But I am also just a teensy bit distracted.

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What a week!

by kelly on June 17, 2010
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You know you’re in for a good week when your Sunday starts with a panel on historical fiction in a packed room at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest.

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Louisa’s blood-and-thunder tales

by kelly on June 9, 2010
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“In 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe (books by this author) wrote to Louisa May Alcott: (books by this author) ‘In my many fears for my country and in these days when so much seductive and dangerous literature is pushed forward, the success of your domestic works has been to me most comforting.’ … “

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Printers Row

by kelly on June 8, 2010
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It’s June, and that means Chicago’s Printers Row Literary Festival is here. Join me and Melanie Benjamin for a conversation moderated by Carolyn Alessio at 11 am on Sunday, June 13 in Dearborn Station.

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Willa Cather

by kelly on June 5, 2010
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I first read O Pioneers! in a college English class on nature writers, and our professor placed the novel in the context of John Muir, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold, and other Americans who were moved to write about the places where they were rooted, the places they worried modern life would destroy.

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