(View entire post here) 

Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune are our guest bloggers during the week of November 2nd. If you have any questions for them, add a comment to any of their posts.

Here is more information on The Naked Pint:

Move over, Merlot. Craft beer has finally found a place at the fine dining table.

Renowned beer sommeliers Hallie Beaune and Christina Perozzi offer a down-to-earth guide to craft and artisanal brews that celebrates beer for what it truly is: sophisticated, complex, and flavorful.

Beaune and Perozzi cover everything from beer basics to the science behind beer, food and beer pairings, home brewing, and tips for perfecting one's palate. This edgy, no-nonsense guide exposes hidden truths, debunks every misconception, and reveals the power that comes with knowing an ale from a lager.

(View entire post here)

Halloween is still two days away but get your vampire fix with this special podcast. Richelle Mead visited the Penguin office about a month ago en route to her Australian book tour and she talked to us about her fabulous YA series, "Vampire Academy".

 Blood Promise

Richelle Mead - author

$16.99 - add to cart

Book: Hardcover | 8.26 x 5.23in | 512 pages | ISBN 9781595141989 | 25 Aug 2009 | Razorbill | 12 - AND UP years 

(View entire post here)

I practiced pediatric emergency medicine and community pediatrics for seventeen years. During that time, I faced rapists, child abusers, gang-bangers who would kill over a pair of shoes, sociopaths, psychotics, narcissists, and even one killer our prosecutor classified as a serial killer.

You know the scary thing about evil? It looks just like you and me.

When I left medicine to fulfill my life-long dream of becoming an author, I knew that I wanted to explore the various faces of evil. Because I've faced it in real-life, I knew how different it was from most of the "bad-guys" portrayed in fiction.

Evil doesn't spend its days plotting dastardly deeds of cunning or intricate, diabolical plots involving red herrings and webs of intrigue.

Rather, the evil I've seen is driven by one simple desire: they know what they want, they want it now, and they don't care what they have to do to get it.

The boy-friend baby-sitting while mom's at work who brutally beat and raped a three year old because she wouldn't go to bed when he told her the first time. He's currently on death row.

The woman who shook her baby so hard the baby hemorrhaged into his brain....because the baby wouldn't stop crying during her favorite TV show.

The gangbanger who shot a kid because he said "hi" to the wrong girl on the wrong street corner while wearing the wrong color of hat.

These are just a few of the faces of evil I've seen.

As November nears, some people begin to think about Thanksgiving, spending time with their families and the upcoming blitz of the holiday shopping season. But for others, the focus for November is one thing only: getting to 50,000 words in 30 days. Yes, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is upon us!

Some say that NaNoWriMo is only for masochists. Others point out that it is more of a quantitative exercise then qualitative (and who but literary folk would use such words?). But I think the best description I've read of NaNoWriMo is that you are given 30 days to let your imagination roam free. Maybe aliens land in Mexico or you spend 1,000 words describing a stain on the couch, so what? The most important thing is that NaNoWriMo gets over 100,000 people around the world writing.

Started in 1999, NaNoWriMo may not have produced the best writing ever (to see a list of published NaNoWriMo authors click here) but it has generated a lot of fun. You do not win prizes for completing your 50k but you can bask in your own personal sense of accomplishment and heck, 50k is a lot of words! (To give you some perspective: in order to write 50k in 30 days, you'd have to write about 1,667 words a day, everyday in November to get there, this blog post is maybe one fourth of that number) NaNoWriMo is possibly the mother of all writing challenges.

(View entire post here)

Why? Easy. Because my sister wins. Hands down. No contest. Every time.

You see, I'm the oldest. The responsible one. The one who always had the hand-me-downs until I learned to sew and make my own clothes and then started to work and buy them myself. The one who was expected to take care of everything (cooking dinner, babysitting, keeping my room clean) and follow the rules.

I'm not a very good oldest. I was a rebel and fiercely independent, resenting any attempt to force me to follow the rules or pigeon-hole me into a caretaker role before I'd even had a chance to figure out who I was. Left home at 17 and pretty much didn't look back for a long time.

You'd think I'd paid my dues. I earned scholarships to college, then worked all through medical school and became a doctor, taught at a prestigious academic medical center, almost died twice on helicopters flying out to get patients in bad conditions, saved lives, comforted the sick and dying....

(View entire post here)

This week's episode of A Cup of Poetry features a dramatic reading of "The Raven" written the famous Edgar Allan Poe and read by Clinton Wilson.

Listen to A Cup of Poetry now and read the poem below!

About the collection: The Portable Edgar Allan Poe is a fully revised collection of Poe's work. The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945 presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe. Along with the author's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, this new Portable Poe includes satirical tales that reflect his critique of American culture.

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe edited by J. Gerald Kennedy

Book: Paperback | 5.07 x 7.79in | 688 pages | ISBN 9780143039914 | 03 Oct 2006 | Penguin Classic | 18 - AND UP

$18.00 - Add to Cart

"The Raven"

» Ron Currie, Jr. discusses his first full length novel, which features a protagonist who is the fourth smartest person in human history and who knows exactly when the world will end.

» Read more about Everything Matters!

Everything Matters! Ron Currie Viking Podcast

(View entire post here)

via press release:

Producer Michael Schwarz says the main characters in this film don't move and they don't talk. "As main characters, that makes it tough," he says about producing "The Botany of Desire," featuring Author Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book.

Airing on Wednesday, October 28, at 8 p.m. EST on PBS, the special takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world -- seen from the plants' points of view. Narrated by Frances McDormand, the program shows how four familiar species -- the apple, the tulip, marijuana (Cannabis) and the potato -- evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.

Schwarz said the whole notion of looking at the world from a plant's point of view was something that nobody had really done before. "It's very provocative and intriguing, and the stories of the plants themselves were so surprising. The most interesting thing about the book is the chance it gives you to get inside Michael's head as he's thinking about these plants, and musing about them, and it is the philosophical nature of the book that's interesting."

The talented cinematographers brought a lot of the look to the film, according to Schwarz. "The interesting thing about cameras is that they can see things that we don't. And one of the things we really tried hard to do was to see the plants in a way you don't ordinarily see them when you look at them in nautre. So we wanted to take them out of their natural environment some, but we also tried to look at them very close up. We used a lot of macro photography in some cases. You saw a lot of that with the marijuana plant, in particular, where you just don't see the resin," Schwarz explains.

(View entire post here)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpts (35)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt A Song for Arbonne Guy Gavriel Kay (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt And Then There's This Bill Wasik (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Ariel Steven R. Boyett (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Belladonna Anne Bishop (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Bitter is the New Black Jen Lancaster (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Blood Bound Patricia Briggs (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Bone Crossed Patricia Briggs (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Bright Lights Big Ass Jen Lancaster (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Candy Girl Diablo Cody (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Cry Wolf Patricia Briggs (Penguin Audio)

Digital-Only Audiobook Excerpt Dark Hunger Christine Feehan (Penguin Audio)

(View entire post here)

Berkley Author Julie Hyzy Wins Two Awards at the 2009 Boucheron

Berkley Prime Crime author Julie Hyzy has won two awards for her book, State of the Onion: A White House Chef Mystery: the Anthony Award and the Barry Award in the Best Paperback Original category. Both awards were presented this past weekend in Indianapolis at Bouchercon, the largest annual meeting in the world for mystery lovers.

The Barry Awards are named for one of the most beloved ambassadors of mystery fiction, Barry Garner, and are voted on the readers of Mystery News and Deadly Pleasures. The Anthony Awards are named for Anthony Boucher, one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, and are among the most prestigious awards in the world of mystery writers.

Julie Hyzy’s new White House Chef Mystery, Eggsecutive Orders will be out in January 2010 and features the White House Easter Egg Roll.