Category Archives: Books and Reading

Hard-boiled and Noir Fiction and Film

Travelling through fetid alleyways in the pouring rain, through thronging cities like beating hearts, and darkened rooms echoing gunshots and last breaths, the fiction and film of the hard-boiled and noir genres bring readers and viewers along for vivid, engrossing, … Continue reading

A Working Girl Comes Back to Life

“For Love or Money: Art, Commerce & Stephen Crane” is about the work of Stephen Crane, boy wonder of the 1890′s literary world. On display at the George Peabody Library through June 14, the exhibition features quite a few phenomenal … Continue reading

Stephen Crane’s War

If you’ve read anything by Stephen Crane, there’s a pretty good chance it was The Red Badge of Courage. Crane’s Civil War story is renowned for its insider perspective on combat experience—what it was like to be surrounded by gunsmoke, … Continue reading

2013 Student Book Collecting Contest Winners Announced

Congratulations to the winners of the 2013 Betty and Edgar Sweren Student Book Collecting Contest. The annual competition, which is sponsored by the Friends of the Libraries and was endowed in 2007 by longtime Friends Betty and Edgar Sweren, recognizes … Continue reading

John Pendleton Kennedy: Author, Statesman, Patriot

The following blog post was written by David Farris of The Sheridan Libraries Reserves Department. While a graduate student at the Peabody Institute, David worked as a student employee at the Peabody Library. There, he spearheaded a project to identify … Continue reading

The Further Adventures of the Digital Humanities

We told you last year about the hot, new field in humanities research, the Digital Humanities, or DH for short. Well, in the past 12 months, it hasn’t cooled off in the least! Sessions on DH at this year’s MLA … Continue reading

Stephen Crane’s Career

How do you become a professional writer? It helps to have a family member provide a model—or better yet, both parents and a couple of siblings. It also helps to have access to a good public library—and to read voraciously, … Continue reading

Game of HopSFA

Are you thrilled that Game of Thrones has returned? Are you a fan of fantasy board games and sci fi movies? Then prepare to immerse yourself in JohnCon 2013 during the weekend of April 5-7. JohnCon is the annual convention … Continue reading

Goodbye Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian novelist and essayist, died on March 22, at age 82. Achebe was best known for his ground-breaking novel of 1958, Things Fall Apart, which dramatizes the tensions between indigenous African culture and British colonial values. … Continue reading

The Writing Life

If you’re a professional writer, you probably think a lot about how to get your work under the eyes of readers. You may weigh the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing—using a service like CreateSpace on Amazon—against traditional publishing. (With self-publishing, … Continue reading