Ka'ak is a famous and popular street bread sold all over the city of Beirut.  It is mostly sold by street vendors on a bicycle where they hang the bread from the pole for easy transportation.  The Ka'ak bread is also called the handbag bread or the purse bread because of its shape.  Sandhya Ramakrishnan  Find recipe serving 4 at https://www.mycookingjourney.com/kaak-bread-kaak-lebanese-purse-bread/

Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.  As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles.  It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula.  Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby.  A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunt Dracula and, in the end, kill him.  Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s.  Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history.  Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the countess Elizabeth Báthory, but there is widespread disagreement.  Stoker's notes mention neither figure.  He found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while holidaying there, picking it because he thought it meant devil in Romanian.  Following its publication, Dracula was positively received by reviewers who pointed to its effective use of horror.  In contrast, reviewers who wrote negatively of the novel regarded it as excessively frightening.  Comparisons to other works of Gothic fiction were common, including its structural similarity to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859).  In the past century, Dracula has been situated as a piece of Gothic fiction.  Modern scholars explore the novel within its historical context—the Victorian era—and discuss its depiction of gender roles, sexuality, and race.  Dracula is one of the most famous pieces of English literature.  Many of the book's characters have entered popular culture as archetypal versions of their characters; for example, Count Dracula as the quintessential vampire, and Abraham Van Helsing as an iconic vampire hunter.  The novel, which is in the public domain, has been adapted for film over 30 times, and its characters have made numerous appearances in virtually all media.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula   Get daily emails at https://draculadaily.substack.com/archive

Studio Kirkland produces:  Dumb Cuneiform, Mighty Oak, Dracula Daily, The Charles Williams Library, The GooglyEyed Project, The Novel Novel, and--in the planning stage--The Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.  https://www.studiokirkland.com/ 

Charles Walter Stansby Williams is best known as a leading member of the Oxford literary group, the "Inklings", whose chief figures were CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.  The Inklings were an informal literary discussion group associated with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis at the University of Oxford for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949.  The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction and encouraged the writing of fantasy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inklings  

Turning Kids Into Readers, One Barbershop At A Time  CORY TURNER  "Barbershop Books"--The small shelves brim with children's books with titles like Not Norman and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  "We have Ninjago, which is one of the books that often gets permanently borrowed.  It's about little LEGO characters who are ninjas."  Alvin Irby wears many hats.  He is a stand-up comedian, a children's book author, a former kindergarten teacher, the founder of Barbershop Books and, above all, a dynamo.  He speaks loudly, even when answering questions in a quiet office that's been emptied by the snow.  His nonprofit has put a curated list of 15 books--all picked by kids--in dozens of barbershops, in predominantly black neighborhoods, across the country.  And that's not counting the many barbers who have heard his story and done something similar on their own.  Irby says he's hoping to help children of color identify as readers.  That means, first and foremost, that reading should be fun. It also means kids need to see their lives and interests reflected in the stories they read.  https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/29/595180210/turning-kids-into-readers-one-barbershop-at-a-time   

Award-winning Spanish novelist Javier Marias died on September 11, 2022, aged 70.  Marias published 16 novels including 'Your Face Tomorrow' a trilogy released between 2002 and 2007.   His books were translated into 46 languages and sold almost 9 million copies across 56 countries.  A translator as well as a columnist for El Pais, Marias received a series of awards for his work.  Last year, he was elected to Britain's Royal Society of Literature as an International Writer.  Graham Keeley  https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spanish-novelist-columnist-javier-marias-dies-aged-70-2022-09-11/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2564  September 14, 2022