Latest news with #Bookends
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Dorset Police search for woman in Jellycat toy theft investigation
A police force has issued images of a woman it is trying to identify in connection to two thefts of toys from a Police said the woman had entered Bookends on High Street in Christchurch and had stolen Jellycat soft toys to the value of £209.92 at about 16:15 BST on 26 added she had returned to the shop at about 14:20 BTS on 8 June to steal more of the same toys to the value of £ Oliver Hudson said officers urged anyone who recognised the suspect to come forward. As Jellycat have become hugely collectable and buyers share their items on social media, their thefts have become more frequent, with instances as large as ram raids have been reported across the country. You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Boston Globe
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Publisher and podcaster Zibby Owens will help you decide what to read this summer
Owens also runs an eponymous publishing company; owns Zibby's Book Shop in Santa Monica, Calif.; and hosts literary salons and retreats around the country, including around Boston. She's also a writer and editor herself ('On Being Jewish Now,' an anthology featuring Jewish writers reflecting on identity; 'Bookends,' a memoir centering around the death of her best friend on Sept. 11). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She's been candid about her connectedness — Owens grew up in Manhattan; her dad is businessman Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group — but she's also really vulnerable about the universal struggles that level us, from divorce with four little kids to self-image issues to identity crises, and she amplifies a variety of voices on her platforms. We chatted about rejection, self-discovery, and summer reads. Advertisement Sign up for Parenting Unfiltered. Globe staff #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe * indicates required E-mail * You went to business school at Harvard. What took you down this road? Books have been the throughline of my own story forever. I fell in love with reading with 'Charlotte's Web.' I started to cry and was forever hooked on reading as the way to think and feel and cry and laugh. You probably know this from your sons, and I know from my kids: You can develop a love of reading, but some people are just born readers. I was just one of those born book lovers. I had my first miniature book published when I was 9 by my grandparents. One of the essays was 'Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers,' about a set of twins in a haunted house. Another was how the doughnut got its hole in the style of Rudyard Kipling. They did a limited print run of 20 books and gave it to me on my 10th birthday. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I eagerly handed out my books to my teacher and all these people I cared about. I had an essay published in Seventeen magazine that I wrote when I was 14 about how I felt in the wake of my parents' divorce and how I had gained a bunch of weight over the course of one year. I interned at Vanity Fair, and I realized after a day that there was no path from editorial to quickly becoming an author. I realized professionally that there was no easy path to being an author. Advertisement I went to business school, and two weeks after I got there, my best friend died on 9/11. She had been my college roommate, and it changed my point of view on basically everything. I realized that 'life is short' is not just something people say. Literally, she was here one minute; gone the next. I was unpacking all her clothes and [thought], I might as well do the things that I want to do in life before it's too late. After business school, I took a year off to freelance full time and write a book full time, a fictionalized version of what happened with her and me. I got an agent. It ended up not selling. My dreams of being the youngest published author in the world had faded by then. It wasn't until I got divorced — fast forward, I'd ended up having four kids — I suddenly had all this time, every other weekend. I started writing a bunch of essays. The essays led me to want to try to publish a book again, because I honestly was so humiliated by my other book not selling that I didn't try to write fiction for over a decade. You know, I write about families, parenting, and how hard it is to find community. It's very easy to feel like we're out there alone, doom-scrolling at 11 o'clock before we fall asleep. Using books, you've been a conduit for creating community with 'Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books,' which I know is now 'Totally Booked.' What do you hope that people get from these podcasts? Moms like me were so busy. We'd talk about books, but a lot of people didn't have time to read them. We didn't want to feel like we were totally missing out. I used to rip magazine articles out and share them with friends before Facebook. Advertisement I wanted to give women like me a free pass. You can be a non-reading reader and still maintain that piece of your identity. I feel like so much identity can be stripped away when you're a parent, especially with young kids. By interviewing the people who wrote the books, I felt like I was at least giving people a way to stay in touch with that piece of themselves. It was with a sense of humor, a wink, and a nod. Obviously, it was not going to be The New Yorker podcast. It was supposed to be the way you would talk to a friend, which is sort of how I do most things in life, whether it's a social media post or the tone of an anthology I'm curating, or my own memoir. It's authentic and close. I feel like people who are attracted to that end up being similar in some ways: They're nice people who want to connect and want to laugh at the craziness of life. Part of the name change is: My kids are a little older now, I don't feel like I'm that frantic young mom that I was, and so many people were deterred from listening because of the 'moms' label. I didn't want that to happen anymore, especially because I don't talk about parenting books, per se. Zibby Owens. James Higgins ©2025 What's the author criteria for your podcast? Most of the books are contemporary fiction, memoir, or nonfiction designed to help me see the world or myself a little more clearly. I don't do science fiction. I want to read books that help me live my life better. Advertisement In this cultural moment, which is fraught in so many different ways, what's your sense of who's buying and consuming books right now? This is not exclusively, but older women and young women — people who, I think, are really trying to find their place in the world: young women who are coming of age; out with their friends and not quite settled, and then women who maybe are empty nesters and feel a little bit unsettled — those life stages when you have a little bit more time and more willingness to be led. I feel like those two groups of women read the most and certainly shop the most often. A lot of the men who come into the store are looking for information on something like education or nonfiction. Women are looking more for escape and connection. As a writer, it's tough not to be hard on yourself. I remember hosting an event in Boston with famous authors and thinking, 'They're so much younger or more successful than me!' How do you put that in perspective, when you're interviewing people who are wildly successful authors? That's such a fun question. When I was writing, before 'Bookends,' I just kept pitching, and I would get a rejection and close out of email and sit down with another author who was a mega-bestseller with tears still on my eyelashes. I thought: Maybe this is not going to happen for me. I have to live with that. We all get choices about what to do with our limited time here. I started to realize that maybe the value I bring to the world is not in the books that I write. Maybe there are other things that I'm called to do. I try to justify it that way. If I were only writing full-time books, I would get more done. But I'm not only writing full-time books. I'm doing a million things that I also love, and so are you. Everything is a tradeoff. Advertisement This is just the way I was made. I'm not made to be a novelist, only sitting at my desk in a fictitious world all day. I love doing that, but I can't do that exclusively. What are you reading? I'm doing a series of live shows right now, so I'm prepping for all of those. I'm finishing Jeanine Cummins's book 'Speak to Me of Home' [about three generations of women connected by their Puerto Rican heritage]. And also 'Greenwich' by Kate Broad, which is quite delicious, although I have to say: I'm probably 70 pages in and I'm like, 'Who dies? Somebody is supposed to die! Who is it going to be? We still don't know!' I'm also prepping [to feature] 'What My Father and I Don't Talk About,' the anthology from Michele Filgate [about the complexity of the writers' relationships with their fathers]. I know you don't talk exclusively to moms, but we're a big part of your audience. How do you hope people feel after listening to your podcast or going into your bookstore? I hope that I help them navigate the world a little more easily and with a sense of humor. They're not alone in anything they're going through, no matter how isolated they might feel. All they have to do is open the next book, and they realize that. Anytime they feel that sense of loneliness or isolation or overwhelm or 'less than,' they can read and immediately feel better, or they can listen to a podcast and glean something about the human experience that maybe they would have missed. Interview was edited for clarity. Kara Baskin can be reached at
CBC
30-05-2025
- General
- CBC
For David A. Robertson, stories are at the heart of reconciliation
Social Sharing Through his books and public speaking, David A. Robertson has dedicated his career to sharing stories about Indigenous people. Robertson began publishing books in 2010 and has since released 33 titles, including picture books, graphic novels, fiction and memoir. With each of his stories, the Winnipeg author delves into hard truths, always with a gentle touch and a profound sense of hope. His recent book, 52 Ways to Reconcile, is a guide for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who want to take action when it comes to reconciliation — and shows how we can work together on the long road ahead. "I really do think it's a community movement and it's not good enough for one [group] to understand the other," he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It's for us to do the work to talk with each other. I can't stress that enough." A two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner and a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, Robertson shared his approach to building community between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people — and why the term "reconciliation" might not be the right word for it. Mattea Roach: I think reconciliation entered the vocabulary for a lot of people when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established back in 2008. But that wasn't the first time the word reconciliation was used to talk about Indigenous peoples and their relationship with Canada. What does the word reconciliation mean to you? David A. Robertson: I've been lucky enough to go to schools across Canada to speak to kids, teachers and adults all over the place. As I've done this work, I've come to a better understanding of what we're trying to do. I do think that reconciliation, in the broad sense that people think about it, is a misnomer because we're not trying to return to anything. We're not trying to fix something that was not broken before. The relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canada has always been broken. So it's not exactly the right word, I don't think. I used it, but I just want people to think critically about everything — so we think critically about this word. What we're trying to do, it's building relationships, it's building community. It's doing that through mutual understanding and respect. What we're trying to do, it's building relationships, it's building community. It's doing that through mutual understanding and respect. - David A. Robertson So we're not trying to build or return to anything. We're trying to build something for the first time. If we keep that in mind, I don't care what you call it, as long as we're doing things properly and with the right kind of vision. I think that conversation hopefully focuses that vision onto the right kind of goals we need to have. You've said that you see reconciliation as a verb. Can you talk more about that concept? It is an action, it is intentionality. We need to continue to think about the actions that we can take in our own capacities and have a long-term view and know that we need to continue to act into the future. My dad used to say that — I'll probably mention my dad every single answer I give — if he did things the right way, he won't see the results of the actions that he's taken in his lifetime. I was given this amazing reminder of that when, after he died, I was giving a personal development session to Indigenous teachers at the Canadian Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg. My dad worked in Indigenous education and after the session, the teachers came up to me and told me that a lot of them were there because of my dad. I saw what he meant there and I wish he was there to see that, but he knew he didn't have to be, he wouldn't be. We have a long road to go and a lot of actions need to be taken and will need to be taken for the foreseeable future. - David A. Robertson It's a continual action and keeping in mind as well that we're still trying not only to heal from what's happened, but we'll be trying to heal from what is happening now for a long time. We still have colonial systems in this country that are doing damage. That means that the clock hasn't started ticking yet to when we need to start healing as a whole. The foster care system, the education system, justice, all of these systems are still in place that are doing harm. So we have a long road to go and a lot of actions need to be taken and will need to be taken for the foreseeable future. If we take them with intentionality and with the knowledge that we all do have a role and we all can take an action and we should take an action, that's when we change this word into a verb. And that verb is a motivational factor for us to continue to do the work together as a community. You say that stories are at the heart of reconciliation. Why is that for you? Reconciliation is inexorably linked with truth. You can't get healing, whatever way you want to talk about it, without truth. And the truth lies in the stories that we tell. My dad and I used to talk about reconciliation as a conversation. It's not a one way conversation. It's like what we're doing now, sitting across the table and talking to each other and listening, really listening to each other and working to understand each other and come to respect through understanding. That's what it is. Then, through that, we see two things. One of them is that we're all people. We share the human condition. And the other thing is that the things that set us apart, the differences, make us stronger as a community. There's a teaching of non-interference in the Cree culture and that is that you don't interfere with how someone else lives. You try to model a good life through how you live. I think that's a really good way to go about anything.
Scoop
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
U.S. GIRLS Announces New Album Scratch It Out June 20 Via 4AD
Toronto-based producer, film composer, and author Meg Remy announces her intuitive and adventurous U.S. Girls album Scratch It (out June 20) with the release of an epic and sprawling 12-minute lead single, ' Bookends '. Co-written with Edwin de Goeji, ' Bookends ' is the heart of Scratch It. The sprawling ballad pays tribute to Remy's late friend and former Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, through the lens of Remy's reading of John Carey's Eyewitness To History, a historical collection of 300+ eyewitness accounts of great world events spanning twenty-four centuries. In consuming these first-hand accounts of human history, she began to ponder the thought, 'there is not a hierarchy to suffering, and death is the great equaliser.' ' Bookends ' is also accompanied by a cinematic short directed by Caity Arthur. They explain,' The video is ultimately about death and absolution — how death is one of the only certain things in life; the 'great equaliser,' nolens volens. However, it also subverts the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience or new beginning through a hallucinatory ensemble cast, a 1960s pop-star performance, and sleight of hand magic. As the video progresses, the TV channels alternate through these scenes as Meg's lyrics evoke death in its various forms.' When an artist follows her instinct, rather than money or trends, she can find inspiration anywhere. When Remy was asked to play a festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas — over one thousand miles away from her Toronto home — it was instinct that led her to enlist guitarist friend Dillon Watson (D. Watusi, Savoy Motel, Jack Name) to assemble a one-time Nashville-based band for the occasion. The performance went so well that she decided to ride that energy right back to where the impromptu band had initially rehearsed, in Music City itself, kickstarting the journey toward Scratch It. In just ten days, Remy and the band — Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and both Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, as well as harmonica legend Charlie McCoy (Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison) — recorded Scratch It live off the floor with minimal overdubs, mixed to tape. Closeness and ease emanate from this core band with Remy's singular voice sparkling on top of every tune, the most relaxed it has ever been. Scratch It weaves together country, gospel, garage rock, soul, disco, folk balladry, and more, with Remy's masterful songwriting threaded throughout. Her choice to discard the computer-based production of previous albums in favor of two-inch tape serves the songs well, introducing an element of sonic shapeshifting expected from an artist nearly twenty years into making records. If instinct was an instrument, Remy would be a virtuoso. Scratch It and see.
CBC
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Madeleine Thien's new time-bending novel is haunted by her father's story
Madeleine Thien is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers. Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing received both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in 2016, telling the story of musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Now, she returns with her latest novel, The Book of Records, which continues her exploration of history, memory and the political forces that shape individual lives. "As Madeleine has said herself, she doesn't see history as separate from the present moment," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview on Bookends. "With this story, she questions the very nature of time, asking, 'How do we engage with great thinkers of the past, and what can they teach us about how to live now?'" Set 100 years in the future, The Book of Records follows Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father as they seek refuge in a place called "the Sea," where time has collapsed. In this world, voyagers and philosophers from centuries past coexist with migrants from around the globe. Lina grows up with only three books, each chronicling the lives of famous voyagers throughout history. Over time, these figures come to life as her eccentric neighbours, eventually becoming her friends. Thien joined Roach on Bookends to discuss the personal connection she feels to the fantastical world she has created, and what it means to exist in a place that blurs past and present. Mattea Roach: What would it mean for a building to be made of time, as Lina's father explains to her, because it's a very metaphysical concept? Lina's father describes it to her as a piece of string that keeps folding over itself, like a constellation knot. And really, what it is, is a crossroads of history. In some ways, it's the way that we hold history inside ourselves. It's the way that many centuries, many ideas, many philosophers, many words inhabit the space of our bodies. In a way, everyone has a kind of "Sea" within themselves. As a novelist, one tries to imagine what that would be like in a concrete sense. Escaping into literature, reading, writing, storytelling is something that Lina and a number of the other characters we meet in The Book of Records do. I understand that when you were growing up, books were somewhat scarce in your household, but you did have Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Were you an encyclopedia reader as a kid? Is your novel drawn from your own childhood reading? It's drawn from the intense longing to have books, definitely. I was just thinking about that this morning, actually — what was in the house? The Encyclopedia Britannica, condensed books and issues of Reader's Digest. I read everything that was lying around. I think, you know, my parents felt that given limited resources, what books could they put around that could kind of represent [an] abundance of reading material. I went to the library every weekend, and I'd just sit there looking at whatever I could find. The specific three encyclopedias that Lina reads over and over, are about the journeys of three historical figures — the 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu. Why these three people in particular? In the book itself, the father says it's random. They're the three books he plucked off the shelf in a chaotic moment and threw into a bag and then they had to leave. For me, The Sea housed many different people at many different times. It took me nine years to write the book and people kind of moved in and moved out. But I wanted to be true to a question that had been disturbing me for a long time, which was, 'How had I come to believe the things I believed? What things were so deeply instilled in me that I didn't see them?' So on that level, I stayed with writers and philosophers and poets who had meant a lot to me for decades. Lina's father is a complex man [and] cares a lot for his daughter. You've described your own father as being a complicated man in his own way. Did you find yourself drawing on your relationship with your father at all? Maybe only in the sense that there was an exceptional person in which something was unfulfilled, and a loving person. My father had to grow up in the shadow of a father who was executed during the Second World War — who was forced to collaborate during wartime occupation, and then was killed when the occupation ended by the occupiers, because he just knew too much. The complexity and the tragedy of my father's childhood is probably woven into all my work in some way or another. Those difficult choices and the long shadow of them haunts the work. What was [your father's] life trajectory? He was born in what was British North Borneo, and then became part of Malaysia. He was the youngest child, and eventually he was sent to college in Melbourne, Australia, and there he met my mother, who was born in China and then brought to Hong Kong as a baby, also during the war. They also were refugees. My parents came to Canada in 1974, and I think it was extremely difficult. My mother was pregnant with me, they had two other children. [It's] a story we know — that uprootedness, that profound desire to make a new home, to make a better life for their kids. It's a story that we know well in Canada. I think my father was the most loving man who tried to find a footing in this continuous uprootedness. In the novel, there are these series of books and there's this epigraph that opens all the books. It's Seneca and it says, "I leave you my one greatest possession, which is the pattern of my life." And I do feel that my parents left me this pattern of their lives that I'm kind of in awe of. I feel as a writer, and just as a person, an obligation to this remembrance and love, and maybe to not being silent in the face of things when I feel something should be said. I want to ask about the dedication to The Book of Records because I know it was dedicated to your best friend, Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away in 2022. Can you tell me a bit about her? Y-Dang was an extraordinary person. She was a professor, she taught Canadian literature. She and her family were named as the last refugees when they came to Canada in the early 1980s and were welcomed by Pierre Trudeau as one of the last of the 60,000 refugees to arrive from Southeast Asia. She's definitely one of those people who gives me courage. She was just a light, I wish she was here.
