Amor Towles (born 1964) is an American novelist.  He is best known for his bestselling novels Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), and The Lincoln Highway (2021).  When Towles was a younger man, he credited Peter Matthiessen, renowned nature writer, novelist and one of the founders of The Paris Review, as the primary inspiration for writing novels.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_Towles  Amor Towles is pronounced ay·mor tow·uhlz.   

Announcing the Winners of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction   The first O. Henry Prize collection, published in 1919, ruled out all non-American writers.  Over the next decades at least one expansion was made to the eligibility rules for the O. Henry Prize.  It is not clear exactly when this happened, but in 1955 a student in Florida mentioned in her master’s thesis on the O. Henry series that “foreign-born authors were eligible if they became U.S. citizens.”  In the 1990s the prize was further opened to Canadian writers.  A further expansion came in 2003 under the ninth series editor, Laura Furman.  The Publishers Weekly review of the 2003 edition noted, “A new, wider-ranging selection process (allowing the consideration of all English-language writers appearing in North American publications regardless of citizenship) makes this one of the strongest O. Henry collections in recent years, with stories by, among others, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”  Nineteen years later, the guest editor for the 2022 volume, Valeria Luiselli, has selected a brand-new story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, along with ten remarkable stories in translation.  This means that fully half of the winning stories this year are artistic collaborations with talented translators who enable readers of English to enjoy fiction originally crafted in Bengali, Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. See winning titles for 2022 at https://lithub.com/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2022-o-henry-prize-for-short-fiction/ 

NATIONAL BEER DAY IS APRIL 7  Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act on March 22, 1933.  It amended the much-hated Volstead Act of 1919, which was the act of Congress that enabled the 18th Amendment and Prohibition.  Back in 1919, some of the politicians who voted for Prohibition assumed that beer and wine sales wouldn’t be banned–just hard liquors–until Prohibitionists used the Volstead Act to broaden the booze ban.  The Cullen-Harrison Act allowed people to buy and drink low-alcohol content beer and wine in public, but it didn’t go into effect until April 7.  On that fateful day, large headlines in newspapers across the nation said the beer was back as the taps opened in 19 states.  In St. Louis, the Budweiser Clydesdales made their first public appearance as they pulled a beer wagon through the city.  In Washington, the owner of the Abner-Drury Brewery ordered a guarded truck to depart at 12:01 a.m. for the White House, with two cases of beer for President Roosevelt.  The shipment arrived along with a local press contingent, only to discover that Roosevelt was asleep.  The Marine who was guarding the beer opened the first symbolic beer bottle and drank it so that the press could get photographs.  Later, the President sent the beer cases to the National Press Club.  In Chicago, an estimated $5 million in beer sales happened on April 7, 1933.  There were few reports of arrests.  In Hollywood, actress Jean Harlow christened a beer delivery truck.  The Cullen-Harrison Act didn’t have a long lifespan.  It was voided when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment in December 1933.  https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-constitutional-origins-of-national-beer-day/  Be creative by mixing beer with mustard, sweets or sauces.   

Formaldehyde is a simple chemical compound made of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.  All life forms--bacteria, plants, fish, animals and humans--naturally produce formaldehyde as part of cell metabolism.  Formaldehyde is perhaps best known for its preservative and anti-bacterial properties, but formaldehyde-based chemistry is used to make a wide range of value-added products.  Formaldehyde is one of the most well-studied and well-understood compounds in commerce.  Formaldehyde is an essential building block chemical in the production of hundreds of items that improve everyday life.  Little, if any, formaldehyde remains in the final products that consumers use.  Formaldehyde-based resins are used to manufacture composite and engineered wood products used extensively in cabinetry, countertops, moldings, furniture, shelving, stair systems, flooring, wall sheathing, support beams and trusses and many other household furnishings and structures.  Glues that use formaldehyde as a building block are exceptional bonding agents, delivering high-quality performance that is also economical.  The wood products industry uses formaldehyde-based resins in a wide range of panel and board products, enabling sustainable use of forestry resources and minimizing waste.  For example, composite wood panels are typically made from recovered wood waste that might otherwise be burned or disposed of in a landfill.  Formaldehyde has a long history of safe use in the manufacture of vaccines, anti-infective drugs and hard-gel capsules.  For example, formaldehyde is used to inactivate viruses so they don’t cause disease, such as the influenza virus in making the influenza vaccine.   https://www.chemicalsafetyfacts.org/formaldehyde/ 

Book banning is not new—in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts.  But the American Library Association said April 4, 2022 that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.  The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021.  MIRANDA MAZARIEGOS and MEGHAN COLLINS SULLIVAN  Find the list of the most challenged books of 2021 at https://www.npr.org/2022/04/04/1090067026/efforts-to-ban-books-jumped-an-unprecedented-four-fold-in-2021-ala-report-says   

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. - Maya Angelou, poet (4 Apr 1928-2014)   

Two notebooks owned by British naturalist Charles Darwin, including one containing a sketch of his famous Tree of Life, have been returned to Cambridge University's library, more than 20 years after they were reported missing.  The notebooks were found in good condition on March 9, 2022 in a gift bag that was left on the floor of the library.  The bag also contained a printed message saying:  "Librarian Happy Easter X."  "They may be tiny, just the size of postcards, but the notebooks' impact on the history of science, and their importance to our world-class collections here, cannot be overstated," Jessica Gardner, the librarian of Cambridge University Library, said.  The notebooks are known as the Transmutation Notebooks because Darwin theorised in them for the first time how species might "transmute" from ancestral to later forms, it said.  https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/darwin-notebooks-return-uk-library-two-decades-after-vanishing-2022-04-05/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2517  April 6, 2022