Linden Frederick:  Night Stories–Fifteen Paintings and the Stories They Inspired  Forum Gallery 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street  New York, NY 10022  May 11, 2017–June 30, 2017  A roster of America’s most renowned, celebrated, and honored authors were invited by Linden Frederick to write a work of short fiction inspired by one of fifteen paintings in Night Stories. The 15 authors whose fiction is featured in Night Stories are:
• Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
• National Book Award-finalist Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog)
• National Book Award-winner Louise Erdrich (The Round House)
• National Book Award-finalist Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End)
• Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen (Rizzoli & Isles series)
• Academy Award-nominee Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
• Kirkus Prize-winner Lily King (Euphoria)
• Edgar Award-winner Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)
• Newberry Medal-winner Lois Lowry (The Giver)
• PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)
• New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice (Crazy in Love)
• Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls)
• Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge)
• Academy Award-winner Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs)
• PEN USA Award-winner Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone)

Linden Frederick’s paintings are nocturnal visions of rural and small-town America, and imbued with a rich sense of mystery, both “ominous and sublime” (Maine Home & Design).  Glitterati Arts Incorporated will publish Night Stories, a book of paintings included in the exhibition together with the short fiction inspired by them, hitting stores in October 2017.  Following its premiere at Forum Gallery, Linden Frederick: Night Stories will also be exhibited in Rockland, Maine from August 18 through November 5, 2017, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.  http://www.artnet.com/galleries/forum-gallery/linden-frederick-night-stories-fifteen-paintings/

Simple Potato Gnocchi  These simple gnocchi are made from russet potatoes, flour, and egg.  Serve them tossed with butter as a side dish or with a more substantial sauce for a main course.  Find recipe at http://www.marthastewart.com/316607/simple-potato-gnocchi

How to pronounce gnocchi in Italian  https://italian-pronunciation-trainer.myshopify.com/blogs/news/41293313-how-to-pronounce-gnocchi-in-italian  How to pronounce gnocchi in English  https://forvo.com/word/gnocchi/

Yaa Gyasi received national acclaim, was listed as a New York Times best-seller, and counts famed author Ta-Nehisi Coates as a vocal admirer.  The novel follows the lives of two Ghanaian sisters and their descendants, tracing the circumstances and effects of the slave trade from a British slave fortress in 18th-century Ghana to modern-day California.  Advice from Yaa Gyasi:  If you’re an aspiring writer and thinking about going to a program, my advice is to just read.  Read an incredible amount.  Read things beyond what you can do and try to figure out what you like about it and what the writer did to make it that way.  Don’t show your work to agents and editors and whatnot until you’re finished with it, until you feel satisfied with it.  https://now.uiowa.edu/2016/10/yaa-gyasi-meteoric-success

Library Systems Report 2017:  Competing visions for technology, openness, and workflow by Marshall Breeding  May 1, 2017   "The Library Systems Report 2017 documents on­going investments of libraries in strategic technology products made in 2016.  It covers organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, offering strategic resource management products—especially integrated library systems and library services platforms—and comprehensive discovery products.  The vendors included have responded to a survey requesting details about their organization, sales performance, and narrative explanations of accomplishments.  Additional sources consulted include press releases, news articles, and other publicly available information."  Read report at https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/05/01/library-systems-report-2017/

Assuming you’re already familiar with Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling “Seabiscuit” (and if not, then with its film adaptation), here are a handful of other books to read on Kentucky Derby Day, and during the rest of the Triple Crown season that follows it.  C. E. Morgan’s novel “The Sport of Kings” (2016), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a slightly off-kilter but powerful place to start.  Horse racing itself is not its central concern, but the sport is a vivid background to the story of several generations in a Kentucky family.  In “Blood Horses” (2004), John Jeremiah Sullivan strongly shares that interest in things that are passed on.  His elliptical book is partly about horses (in an encyclopedic way:  from modern horse racing to zoology to ancient myths), and partly about his relationship with his sportswriter father.  It includes, among other things, a moving description of Secretariat’s astonishingly dominant win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.  Speaking of arguably the greatest thoroughbred to ever race, William Nack’s “Secretariat:  The Making of a Champion,” originally published in 1975 as “Big Red of Meadow Stable,” is a thorough and often lyrical account of the sport and its biggest star.  A personal favorite that is harder to track down these days is Joe Palmer’s “This Was Racing” (1953), a collection of pieces from the journalist’s work at The New York Herald Tribune starting in 1946.  Lastly, no horse racing library is complete without a good guide (or two or three) to betting.  I’d suggest Steve Davidowitz’s “Betting Thoroughbreds for the 21st Century,” his most recent update of a book first published in 1977.   John Williams  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/books/5-books-to-read-on-kentucky-derby-day.html

The Kushner family came to the United States as refugees, worked hard and made it big—and if you invest in Kushner properties, so can you.  That was the message delivered May 6, 2017 by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s sister to a ballroom full of wealthy Chinese investors, renewing questions about the Kushner family’s business ties to China.  Over several hours of slide shows and presentations, representatives from the Kushner family business urged Chinese citizens gathered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel to consider investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a New Jersey real estate project to secure what’s known as an investor visa.  The EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign investors to invest in U.S. projects that create jobs and then apply to immigrate, has been used by both the Trump and Kushner family businesses.  But President Trump’s vow to crack down on immigration, as well as criticism from members of Congress, has led to questions about the future of a program known here as the “ golden visa.”  The woman identified as “Jared’s sister” was believed to be Nicole Kushner, who is involved in the family business, not Dara Kushner, who generally stays out of the spotlight.  But the woman’s face was not clearly visible from the back of the ballroom, where reporters were told to remain.  Saturday’s event in Beijing was hosted by the Chinese company Qiaowai, which connects U.S. companies with Chinese investors.  The tagline on a brochure for the event:  “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”

Emily Rauhala  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-a-beijing-ballroom-kushner-family-flogs-500000-investor-visa-to-wealthy-chinese/2017/05/06/cf711e53-eb49-4f9a-8dea-3cd836fcf287_story.html?utm_term=.0d2bb2cd0fd4

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1705  May 8, 2017  On this date in 1541, Hernando de Soto reached the Mississippi River and named it Río de Espíritu Santo.  On this date in 1861, Richmond, Virginia was named the capital of the Confederate States of America. 

Word of the Day  macron  noun   A short, straight, horizontal diacritical mark (¯) placed over any of various letters.  It usually is used to indicate that the pronunciation of a vowel is long; in Mandarin Pinyin (Chinese), it indicates the first tone, e.g., chūzūchē.