RABBIT RECOGNITION  Nature Conservancy’s magazine’s cover story for Winter 2021 won a “highly commended”  award in the London Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.  Nature Conservancy magazine Winter 2022   

Nature Conservancy 2022 Photo Contest 

BRANCHING OUT  On either side of a highway, gullies formed by rainwater erosion span out like a tree in Tibet, an autonomous region in southwest China.  © Li Ping/TNC Photo Contest 2022

MANGROVE TREE  This photo was taken in Lamongan, East Java at sunset. Mangroves were planted to reduce the impact of abrasion around this area.  © Waluya Priya Atmaja/TNC Photo Contest

DRAGON BLOOD TREES  Dragon Blood Trees in a long exposure night photo.  These trees grow only in the high plateaus of Socotra Island.  © Cristiano Xavier/TNC Photo Contest  See images plus those of other winners at https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/photo-contest/2022-win   

Bialy (Yiddish: ביאלי), a Yiddish word short for bialystoker kuchen (Yiddish: ביאליסטאקער קוכען), from the city of Białystok in Poland, is a traditional bread roll in Polish Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine.  A chewy yeast roll bearing similarity to the bagel, the bialy has a diameter of up to 15 centimetres (5.9 in).  Unlike a bagel, which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked, and instead of a hole in the middle it has a depression.  Before baking, the depression is filled with diced onion and other ingredients, sometimes including garlic, poppy seeds, or bread crumbs.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bialy_(bread)   

Truman Capote, original name Truman Streckfus Persons, (1924-1984), American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose early writing extended the Southern Gothic tradition, though he later developed a more journalistic approach in the novel In Cold Blood (1965; film 1967), which, together with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958; film 1961), remains his best-known work.  His parents were divorced when he was young, and he spent his childhood with various elderly relatives in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama.  (He owed his surname to his mother’s remarriage, to Joseph Garcia Capote.)  Capote’s later writings never approached the success of his earlier ones.  In the late 1960s he adapted two short stories about his childhood, “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” for television.  The Dogs Bark:  Public People and Private Spaces (1973) consists of collected essays and profiles over a 30-year span, while the collection Music for Chameleons:  New Writing (1980) includes both fiction and nonfiction.  In later years Capote’s growing dependence on drugs and alcohol stifled his productivity.  Moreover, selections from a projected work that he considered to be his masterpiece, a social satire entitled Answered Prayers, appeared in Esquire in 1975–76 and raised a storm among friends and foes who were harshly depicted in the work (under the thinnest of disguises).  He was thereafter ostracized by his former celebrity friends.  The book, which had not been completed at the time of his death, was published as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel in 1986.  Summer Crossing, a short novel that Capote wrote in the 1940s and that was believed lost, was published in 2006.   https://www.britannica.com/biography/Truman-Capote   

moniker  noun  "person's name, especially a nickname or alias," 1849, said to be originally a hobo term (but monekeer is attested in London underclass from 1851), of uncertain origin; perhaps from monk (monks and nuns take new names with their vows, and early 19c. British tramps referred to themselves as "in the monkery").  https://www.etymonline.com/word/moniker   

Gayl Jones, the highly acclaimed author who was first “discovered” and mentored by Toni Morrison, has twice disappeared from our sight.  The first time was after a stellar launch as one of America’s most daring and distinctive literary lights, after two brilliant novels (Corregidora and Eva’s Man) brought out by Morrison at Random House, and one slim but oh-so-astonishing story collection (White Rat), when she went into a self-imposed exile in France, from the late 1970s until the late 1990s.  In the interval, Gayl began sending me other manuscripts, a total of five others, which we have been publishing one by one as we finalize edits, designs, and roll them off the press.  Beacon is about to launch The Birdcatcher, which Publishers Weekly just hailed with these words in a starred review:  “Jones continues her marvelous run after last year’s Pulitzer finalist Palmares with the gloriously demented story of an artist who keeps trying to kill her husband,” and which the great minds at Powell’s have declared a “Pick of the Month.”  Here Gayl shifts from 17th-century Brazil to 20th-century Ibiza (and various US cities) for a very modern account of Black Americans in exile.  Helene Atwan  https://lithub.com/the-best-american-novelist-to-disappear-and-come-back-twice/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2598  November 30, 2022