Presenting Jane Austen

One of the titles for Spring '09 that I'm personally most excited about is Remarkably Jane by Jennifer Adams. What a great little book to sit alongside classics like Pride and Prejudice and Emma!
This book is full of delightful quotes from authors, actors, directors, contemporaries and more all speaking out about one of literature's best-loved novelists. However, not everone is a Jane Austen fan and, in fact, some have been quite critical of her work, but we'll save those criticisms for another day.
Here is a sampling of the positive praise:

"I'm most interested in human behavior, which is probably why I'm such a
pushover for Jane Austen."
-- Emma Thompson, 2006, screenwriter and actress portraying Elinor in the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility

"I think, the fact that we have fallen in love with Elizabeth Bennet ... means, in effect, that we have fallen in love with Jane Austen; and once we do that we are her lovers for life."
-- Frank Swinnerton, 1940, literary critic and novelist

"All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama."
-- Harper Lee, 1964, novelist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Christmas Love plagiarized by popular religion author

Author Candy Chand's story and the Gibbs Smith title Christmas Love was recently plagiarized by the popular religion writer Neale Donald Walsch on BeliefNet.com, a popular religious community on the Internet.

The New York Times and The Associated Press picked up the story and there are now more than 1,000 mentions of the incident and reruns of the article on the Internet and in newspapers around the globe.

Candy Chand wanted to set the record straight that she is the true author of the popular, heartwarming Christmas story, Christmas Love, sometimes referred to as "The W in Christmas" on the Internet.

Neale Donald Walsch has sinced apologized for copying Chand's story on his BeliefNet.com blog and The New York Times ran an updated report on Jan. 11. Walsch has since been removed from the BeliefNet blog lineup.

Watch this spoof about the incident on Colbert Report that aired on Thursday, Jan. 8.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Yahweh or No Way - Roland Burris

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

To Order Christmas Love by Candy Chand, it is now available as a gift book on Amazon and other online stores, as well as the Gibbs Smith Web site:

The Influence of Japanese Art on Design

Published October, 2008.

This book explores the story of the “Japan Craze” as the catalyst of modern design in Gilded Age America. Much more than a simple fad, it came at a time of radical change in both societies, as the Western yearning for the values of a past it believed were embodied in Japanese traditional arts combined with Japan’s own drive to modernity. In the process, both time-honored arts and modern manufactures from Japan became the inspiration of an international coterie of artists, dealers, and thinkers, who through word and artistic creations of their own proselytized Japanese aesthetics as a model, recreating American design to meet emerging lifestyles as the twentieth century dawned. Beginning in the Aesthetic Movement, through Arts & Crafts, and ending in the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright, through ceramics, textiles, furniture, metal crafts, silver, and glass from both nations as well as from the United Kingdom and France, in this book we see how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept.