Tag Archives: poetry

Album review: Dear Mark Mulcahy, I Love You – Mark Mulcahy

DEAR MARK J MULCAHY, I LOVE YOU Mark Mulcahy (Southbound) When Mark Mulcahy’s wife died suddenly in 2008 aged 41, some of his fans put together a tribute album – with star turns by Michael Stipe, Thom Yorke, Mercury Rev, The National and Dinosaur Jr. So if such luminaries like him, how come the rest of the world have taken such a long time to catch on – after all, he’s been out there three decades and has five previous solo full-lengthers as well as his 80s band Miracle Legion back catalogue His strangely gentle psychedelic sound supports wonderfully observant street poetry – like Lou Reed backed by The Presidents of the USA with the occasional flute thrown in for good luck

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Prize for bringing moa back to life

Quinn Berentson has won $2500 for resurrecting the moa – in his award-winning book, Moa: The life and death of New Zealand’s legendary bird. It is among three winners of the New Zealand Society of Authors’ Best First Book Awards, and was described by chief judge John Campbell as “a really great historical biography, in which almost everyone (including the bird itself) is varying degrees of mad”.

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Welcome to Dan Brown hell

Dan Brown literary efforts have annoyed a lot of people over the years – historians, Catholics, academics, book critics, conspiracy theorists, the list is endless. So you’d expect his latest novel, Inferno, to come in for a fair amount of flak, especially in light of the threatening legal non-disclosure agreements the critics had to sign before they were allowed to read it

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Pakistan’s top court allows Nawaz Sharif to run for political office

Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned its ban on opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and his brother, allowing both men to run for political office, a court representative told CNN Tuesday. British poet Ruth Padel resigned as the University of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry Monday, only days after being elected to the 300-year old title. But rival poet Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1992, pulled out of the race earlier this month amid allegations about his private life.

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2009 Pulitzer Prizes awarded

The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2009 were announced Monday, with The New York Times capturing five of the awards. The Times garnered wins in the categories of breaking news reporting, investigative reporting, international reporting, criticism and feature photography. In the arts, “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout won for fiction, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II” by Douglas A

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Pet Shop Boys come back with a lot of ‘love, etc.’

Twenty-five years after the hit single "West End Girls," can the Pet Shop Boys pull off songs that make you want to dance like it’s 1984, but still reflect a social consciousness of 2009? The answer is the title of their latest album: “Yes.” The British duo will release their 10th studio album on April 21 in the United States through Astralwerks

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Tough task: Designing a game about your ‘first time’

In an industry dominated by men, leave it to women to come up with the winning idea in a contest to create a concept for a video game about losing one’s virginity. On Wednesday, at the Game Developers Conference here, the two-woman team of Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson won the Game Design Challenge with just 36 hours of preparation, while their competitors had weeks to come up with concepts for a game about “your first time.” This was the sixth straight year of the design challenge, hosted annually by New York-based game developer Eric Zimmerman.

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