The platform you are looking for promoting your audio books is just available with Soundcloud. It has the drop box that is there for making you come across the submitted files along with the fact that you can easily share whatever you want with your groups whether it’s family, friends or official one. The comment features are also there to give you way for proofing the file. There are numerous players available that after you are over with your work, make it presentable in simplest possible respects with different websites as well as social networks. Another way is to pay to Soundcloud. In case you want to advertise links that are there to make people come across their promotion. (more…)

ROBERTSDALE — From Magnolia Springs to Little River, the county bookmobile continues make its rounds.

Its fall schedule includes several new stops, including one in the parking lot of Bruno’s grocery at Blakeley Square Shopping Center at U.S. 31 and Alabama 225 in Spanish Fort.

The bookmobile makes 37 stops every two weeks at schools, retirement communities and community centers.

In addition to the 3,000 books and audiotapes on the bookmobile, items can be borrowed from any library in the county. (more…)

FAIRHOPE — Pulitzer prize-winning author Rick Bragg will be on the Eastern Shore Wednesday for a program at the University of South Alabama-Baldwin County.

“An October Evening with Rick Bragg” will begin at 7 p.m. and is sponsored by Over The Transom Books, in collaboration with the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts and USABC.

The New York Times Journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner will be winding up his tour promoting his latest book “Ava’s Man.” Recently released in paperback, the book is currently on the New York Times paperback best-sellers list. (more…)

The Irish author John Banville‘s “Shroud” is itself a shroud, a roman clef concerning the life of Paul de Man (1919-1983), teacher at Cornell (1960-66) and Johns Hopkins (1967-1970), and distinguished Yale professor (1970-1983). Paul de Man is the father of American deconstruction or, more precisely, rhetorical reading: a theory of language which focuses on figurality — metaphor, personification, symbol, etc. — and the production of meaning in a text. The amazing thing about Banville’s novelization of this theory that confounds many is the irony behind “Shroud’s” conception: Banville himself never attended university but is, rather, an autodidact. At once brilliant in its pastiche and clever in its construction, “Shroud” ends as uncertainly as it begins, which is appropriate considering that, within the realm of deconstruction, there is no logos and no telos. (more…)

Writers from Alabama and all over the Southeast are packing their sandals and sunglasses for a weekend on the beach where they will learn how to get published and can network with other writers at the Silken Sands Writers Conference.

Sponsored by the Gulf Coast Chapter of Romance Writers of America, the conference will be held at the White Sands Resort Holiday Inn in Gulf Shores on April 25-27. The registration fee is $125 before April 1, $150 after. “The conference has something for every fiction writer,” said chapter president Elizabeth Smith of Pass Christian, Miss. “Although we are a romance chapter, we believe good writing has common elements that cross all genres. We invite all writers to participate.” (more…)

Tis a season of war. And though we in the West like to think of ourselves as a peaceful people, the reality is that we are heir to a warrior tradition stretching back millennia. It begins with Achilles, tempestuous, passionate and fearsome in battle. Immortalized, perhaps invented, by Homer, Achilles has inspired admiration and envy down the centuries. Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad on campaign, and styled himself the new Achilles as he swept across Persia. During the early 19th century, the Romantic Poets praised him as a man of action, loyalty and feeling. And when the British stormed ashore at Gallipoli in 1915, more than one officer, knowing his Homer, keenly felt the resonance of fighting in the same part of the world where Troy’s ruins stand. In a lull before the assault, one of them wrote, Stand in the trench, AchilleFlame capped, and shout for me. (more…)

With profound apologies to the ghost of John Steinbeck, I offer the following –

A few miles south of Lucedale, Miss., two dusty travelers pause by the roadside. Both are dressed in denim trousers and denim coats with brass buttons. Both wear black, shapeless hats and carry tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. The first man is small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him is defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him stands his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes and wide, sloping shoulders. He walks heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. (more…)

Today’s Books page highlights “The Heaven of Mercury” (Norton, $23.95), an earthy new Southern novel by Brad Watson. Other writers have been especially impressed with this complicated, darkly humorous and sometimes disturbing tale. Larry Brown called it “As mythic and miraculous as Faulkner and Mrquez” and Barry Hannah declared “Each page a deep pleasure.” Reviews in the press have been mixed, however, and squeamish readers should be warned of the book’s strong sexual content (necrophilia, rape, masturbation and more). “The Heaven of Mercury” stirs many emotions. (more…)

This is no exaggeration — one of the best bookstores between Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas, occupies an unassuming downtown Pensacola storefront. I owe my friend Franklin Daugherty a debt of gratitude for recently introducing me to this slightly scruffy literary haven, packed with more good, serious, used books than any other place I’ve been to in a long time. (more…)