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Burning Questions
Wondering what happened to your favorite author? Gosh, so are we. Ask away: Send your cards and letters to Burning Questions, 2143 Belcourt Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212. Or better yet, send us e-mail. When you write, please include your full name and the city and state where you live. Sadly, personal replies are not possible. And if your question is too hard, we'll simply put it in our big file labeled "We dunno."
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DOUBLE TAKE
Dear Burning Questions, I was wondering if Kate White of Cosmo magazine was coming back with another mystery. Also, Scarlett Thomas — anything new from her? Kay Davis You're in luck—BQ has the word on both of your missing authors. First things first: Cosmopolitan editor Kate White has made a successful second career for herself with a series of mysteries starring Bailey Weggins, writer for a fictional celebrity magazine. White's fifth Weggins adventure, Lethally Blond, will be published May 23 by Warner Books. When Bailey's old flame Chris calls, he has more on his mind than romance—he wants Bailey to help him locate his co-star on a hit TV crime show, a man who has disappeared just when he's on the verge of becoming a star. Appropriately enough, the TV show is called "Morgue." As for English author Scarlett Thomas, her next work (after last fall's acclaimed The End of Mr. Y) is a little further in the future: Spring 2008, to be exact. Her publicist at Harcourt informs BQ that her next release is "untitled as yet, but will feature an offbeat, hapless writer named Io who has a sister who has been in a coma for 16 years. It's going to be another philosophical adventure story like The End of Mr. Y, but with even more strange twists and turns."
CULINARY ADVENTURES Dear Burning Questions, Is there another novel from Nicole Mones (Lost in Translation, Cup of Light) coming soon?
Carol DeLuca
Mones returns to China in her third novel, The Last Chinese Chef, to be published in May by Houghton Mifflin. The author spent 18 years running a textile business in China, beginning in 1977, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution. As part of her work, she attended official banquets in many provinces and soon discovered that Chinese food held signficant cultural meanings. "As I learned Chinese, I also came to see that the cuisine had a secret language of its own," Mones recalls. "From seating to serving to the menu itself, every arranged meal sent signals without words." Mones went on to write regular features about Chinese food for Gourmet, which published excerpts of her upcoming novel last summer, the first fiction ever published in the magazine. The Last Chinese Chef finds widowed food writer Maggie McElroy traveling to China to investigage a paternity claim against her late husband's estate. There, she meets rising culinary star Sam Liang and begins a journey into China's storied food culture. Recipes for dishes mentioned in the novel can be found at nicolemones.com.
HARRY'S LAST HURRAH
Not since the days of Charles Dickens—when American readers waited at the docks to find out if the author's beloved "Little Nell" had died—has there been such anticipation for the last installment of a series. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series, is set for publication worldwide on Saturday, July 21, which means fans have less than five months to engage in frenzied speculation about who will die in the finale. Author J.K. Rowling has promised that two characters will be killed off in the final book, but who could she be referring to? Could it be Harry's buddy Ron? Or the evil Voldemort? Or—dare we say it—Harry himself? "I both want, and don't want, to finish this book," Rowling told fans on her website late last year at the time she was completing the manuscript. Readers will probably feel the same way about opening the final book in the series—anxious to find out what happens but dreading the end of it all. Oh, Harry, we hardly knew ye!
WINNER'S CIRCLE Star power Congratulations to the winners of the Hollywood Legends contest in our November issue, sponsored by Harmony Books. Grand Prize winner Sylvia Chow of Endwell, New York, received a collection of classic movies starring Audrey Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, along with copies of two new books: Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto and Jimmy Stewart: A Biography by Marc Eliot. Runners-up were Norma Mottet, of Maquoketa, Iowa, Ca'Trina Bibbs, of Ponca City, Oklahoma, and Joanne Alvergue of San Francisco. Each received copies of the two biographies.
AWARD SEASON Hollywood types have the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild. In the book world, there's no red carpet for designer-clad starlets to strut their stuff, but there are many awards given to honor talent and accomplishment. Check out the book award recipients and finalists named by these organizations for titles to add to your reading list. American Library Association The ALA announced the winners of its major children's book awards at a midwinter meeting in Seattle: • The Caldecott Medal, honoring an illustrator for a picture book, went to David Wiesner for Flotsam.
National Book Critics Circle Award winners will be announced on March 8. Finalists in two of the major categories are: Nonfiction • Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Fiction • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Mystery Writers of America Winners of the Edgar Awards will be announced April 26. Finalists for best mystery novel are: • Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
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