Birthdays: Charles Perrault (1628), Edmund Burke (1729), Laura Adams Amer (1874), Jack London (1876), Margaret Danner (1915), William Nicholson (1948), Haruki Murakami (1949), Walter Mosley (1952), David Mitchell (1969), Julia Quinn (1970),

Quote: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London

Charles Perrault is noted for being the originator of the fairy tale genre.

Laura Amer won the 1932 Newbery Award winner for “Waterless Mountain”

I read a lot of Jack London when I was in high school. Some of his works are still favorites. But Charles Perrault is the one who gave us tales we’ll remember forever – like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and more.

Birthdays: Alice Rice (1870), Bernard DeVoto (1897), Alan Paton (1903), Manfred Lee (1905), Helen Howe (1905), Diana Gabaldon (1952), Robert O’Brien (1918), Aldo Leopold (1887), Mary Rodgers (1931), Jill Churchill (1943), Jasper Fforde (1961), Alethea Kontis (1976)

Quote: “If you’re going to have more than one person read your book, they’re going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person – no two people – read the same book.” – Diana Gabaldon

 “Getting a book published is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do and getting a picture book published is darned near impossible. Have a thick skin and prepare yourself for truckloads of rejection and humiliation. But if you’re just masochistic and hard-headed enough to never give up, you’ll make it happen. (Just like anything else in this world.) I wish you the best of luck!” Alethea Kontis, writer of YA books, picture books.

Mary Rodgers, writer of books like “Freaky Friday” is the daughter of Richard Rodgers and she started out writing musicals.

Alan Paton was a South African author and anti-apartheid activist who was famous for his first novel “Cry, the Beloved Country”.

Bernard DeVoto won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for History for “Across the Wide Missouri”

Manfred Lee wrote under the name “Ellery Queen” and was famous for his mysteries.

Robert O’Brien won the 1972 Newbery Medal for “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH”

Under Romance:

Lost in the Wind by Calle J. Brookes – a 3 Sparkler Contemporary Romantic Suspense

By Any Other Name by Alana Lorens – a 4 Sparkler Contemporary Romance

Under Nonfiction:

In Focus Runes by Jan Budkowski – a 4 Sparkler How-to for those who are interested in Runes

Enjoy!

Birthdays: Robinson Jeffers (1887), Dumas Malone (1892), Cynthia Freeman (1915), Philip Levine (1928), Stephen Ambrose (1936), Daniel Walker Howe (1937), Jared Carter (1939), George Alec Effinger (1947), Dorianne Laux (1952), Steve Hamilton (1961)

Quote: “If that voice you created that is most alive…isn’t carried throughout the whole poem, then…destroy where it’s not there.” – Philip Levine

Philip Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “The Simple Truth” and was appointed Poet Laureate of the US for 2011-2012.

Dumas Malone won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History for his biography of Thomas Jefferson

Daniel Howe won the 2008 Pulitzer for History for “What Hath God Wrought”

Dorianne Laux is a multiple prize winner for poetry

Birthdays: Thomas Warton (1728), Thomas Robertson (1829), Henry Fuller (1857), Karel Capek (1890), Simone de Beauvoir (1908), Judith Krantz (1928), Algis Budrys (1931), Wilbur Smith (1933), Ann Siddons (1936), William Morris Meredith (1919), Stuart Woods (1938), John Dunning (1942), Philippa Gregory (1954), Rigoberta Menchu (1959)

Quote: “Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book.” – Ann Rivers Siddons

Anne Rivers Siddons was an American novelist who wrote stories set in the southern United States. Two of her best known novels are Peachtree Road, and Heartbreak Hotel, which was made into a film titled Heart of Dixie. She wrote 19 novels that featured feisty characters who defied social expectations to find their way in the world.

Karel Capek was a science fiction writer known for making the word “robot” popular.

Thomas Warton (the younger) was Poet Laureate in 1785.

William Morris Meredith was the US Poet Laureate from 1978-1980

Henry Fuller was perhaps the earliest established American author to explore homosexuality in fiction.

Simone de Beauvoir had significant influence on feminist theory and her book “The Second Sex” was a detailed analysis of women’s oppression.

Birthdays: Wilkie Collins (1824), Storm Jameson (1891), Dennis Wheatley (1897), Charles Tomlinson (1927), Alexandra Ripley (1934), Terry Brooks (1944)Quote:

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.” – Wilkie Collins

“I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind: to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.” – Terry Brooks

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White, and for The Moonstone, which has been proposed as the first modern English detective novel.

Dennis Yeats Wheatley was an English writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world’s best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s. His Gregory Sallust series was one of the main inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories.

Alexandra Ripley was an American writer best known as the author of Scarlett, written as a sequel to Gone with the Wind. Her first novel was Who’s the Lady in the President’s Bed?. Charleston, her first historical novel, was a bestseller, as were her next books On Leaving Charleston, The Time Returns, and New Orleans Legacy.

I adore Terry Brooks books. Especially his “Shannara” series. Found out though that while I can read them, I can’t handle watching the series. However his “Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold” is and will always be one of my favorite fantasy books.

Birthdays: John Remsburg (1848), Zora Hurston (1891), Cresson Kearny (1914), Robert Duncan (1919), Gerald Durell (1925), William Blatty (1928), Edwin Torres (1931), Kay Chorao (1936), Hayford Peirce (1942), Ben Fong-Torres (1945), Nicholson Baker (1957), Billy Merrell (1982),

Quote: “Poetry is prose in slow motion.” – Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Zora Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.

William Blatty is best known for his 1971 novel “The Exorcist”, for which he won the Academy Award for the screenplay of its film adaptation and was nominated for Best Picture as its producer. The film also earned Blatty the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama as producer.

Edwin Torres is best known for his book “Carlito’s Way.”

I tried reading Blatty’s “The Exorcist” once. Nope. Nor the movie. Kind of freaked me out.

Birthdays: Carl Sandburg (1878), Khalil Gibran (1883?), John Holmes (1904), Wright Morris (1910), Alan Watts (1915), E.L. Doctorow (1931)

Quote: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L.Doctorow

“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.” – Carl Sandburg

Doctorow was the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime, National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Bathgate, National Book Critics Circle Award for The March, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. Former President Barack Obama called him “one of America’s greatest novelists”

Khalil Gibran is best known as the author of “The Prophet”, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.

Morris won the National Book Award for “The Field of Vision” in 1956. His final novel, “Plains Song” won the American Book Award in 1981.

Alan Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, “from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written”. He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as “The New Alchemy” (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology.

I remember reading Carl Sandburg’s books on Lincoln with my dad when I was growing up. I also read a lot of his poetry. I’ve read parts of Khalil Gibran too. The others, not so much.

Birthdays: Jacob Grimm (1785), Max Eastman (1883), James Bond (1900), Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (1933), Gao Xingjian (1940), Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943), Natalie Goldberg (1948), Harlan Coben (1962), Christina Baker Kline (1964).

Quote: “Once I have the idea for a story, I start collecting all kinds of information… For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say ‘That’s exactly what the father in my book looks like!’…I save everything that will help.” – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Doris Goodwin won the 1995 Pulitzer for History

Harlan Coben was the first author to win all three of these: the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony Awards.

James Bond – no, not the spy, though he was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character.

Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature

Who has not read a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers? Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and more. Almost any common fairy tale we know today was penned by them.

And Natalie Goldberg’s books on writing are among my favorites.