Author Spotlight: Carol Higgins Clark

Get to know PCL's Annual Summer Celebrity before her visit to Parkland High School's auditorium on Wed., June 9th at 7pm!

Carol Higgins Clark is the author of thirteen Regan Reilly mysteries, all of which have hit the New York Times bestseller list. A native New Yorker, Carol has four siblings and an incredibly famous mother, America's #1 bestselling suspense writer, Mary Higgins Clark. They have co-authored five bestselling holiday suspense novels, including Dashing Through the Snow.

Carol obtained her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College. She then studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. After several acting gigs in theater, film and television, Carol tried her hand at writing a novel. The result was Decked, the first Regan Reilly novel and a nominee for both an Anthony and Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

Here are some fun facts about Carol:
*Her first job was at a dry cleaners, which inspired her to cast a character in Iced as an employee at a dry cleaners.
*One critic has noted "Mary Higgins Clark goes for the jugular; Carol Higgins Clark goes for the funny bone."
*Together, Carol Higgins Clark and Mary Higgins Clark received the University of Scranton's Distinguished Author Award in September 2000.
*Carol has recorded several of her mother's works, as well as her own novels. She received AudioFile magazine's Earphones Award of Excellence for her reading of Jinxed in 2002.
*Her training as a novelist began early on, as she typed up some of her mother's novels on a manual typewriter.
*She starred in Who Killed Amy Lang?, a mini-mystery aired on "Good Morning America."
*Carol was the lead in the film A Cry in the Night, based on the novel by her mother. The film was shown at the Cannes TV Festival and nationally on U.S. television.
*She was named one of Irish America magazine's Top 100 Irish Americans in 2005.
*Some of Carol's favorite films include The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, The Birds, The Exorcist, Arthur and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

To learn more about this popular author, visit her website. Also, check out Barnes and Nobles' "Meet the Author" page featuring Carol Higgins Clark. Information for this post was found on both sites.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction

Looking for a good book? Pick up one of these Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction today! Each novel includes an excerpt from its Publishers Weekly review.

2010
Tinkers by Paul Harding - "The real star is Harding's language, which dazzles whether he's describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship."

2009
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - "Thirteen linked tales from Strout (Abide with Me, etc.) present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection."

2008
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz - "...Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation."

2007
The Road by Cormac McCarthy - "McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out."

2006
March by Geraldine Brooks - "Brooks's luminous second novel...imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women...Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering."

2005
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - "Robinson's prose is beautiful, shimmering and precise; the revelations are subtle but never muted when they come, and the careful telling carries the breath of suspense...Many writers try to capture life's universals of strength, struggle, joy and forgiveness - but Robinson truly succeeds in what is destined to become her second classic."

For a complete list of Pulizer Prize-winning fiction, click here. Visit the Pulitzer Prize homepage to learn more about this prestigious award.

Choose Privacy Week

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

Celebrate the first ever Choose Privacy Week (May 2-8, 2010) by checking out this video featuring individuals such as Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and ALA President Camila Alire.

According to the American Library Association's Privacy Revolution website "Choose Privacy Week is a new initiative that invites library users into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age." For more info, visit Privacyrevolution.org.

What are your thoughts on privacy?