LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Get Ready for Teen Read Week

Teen Read Week is October 15-21.  An adolescent literacy initiative of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) of the American Library Association, Teen Read Week is aimed at teens, their parents, librarians, educators, booksellers and other concerned adults.  To find out more about how you can participate, click here.  And while you're there, be sure to take a look at the great booklists that have been created to go with the "Get Active@Your Library" theme.

Naguib Mahfouz

Egytian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz died Wednesday at age 94.  Mahfouz's stories are frequently anthologized in high school world literature textbooks.  His most famous works are the three novels that make up his "Cairo Trilogy"--Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street.  Here's more about him from the Seattle Times:

Naguib Mahfouz, 94, was only Arab to win a Nobel for literature
By McClatchy Newspapers and Los Angeles Times

Naguib Mahfouz wrote more than 40 novels and 30 film scripts.

Naguib Mahfouz, whose novels about the struggles of workaday Egyptians drew worldwide acclaim and made him the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer Wednesday in Cairo. He was 94.

A literary pioneer and icon of Arab letters, Mr. Mahfouz's life traced an outline of the daily pleasures and political struggles of his beloved homeland and the broader Arab world beyond.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak issued a statement mourning the loss of "an exceptional writer, an enlightened thinker, an author who brought Arab culture and literature to the world's attention."  More here.