The Open Road Blog

Happy National Teacher Day! In honor, Open Road Media is proud to feature several moving videos, which explore the tremendous dedication and influence of teachers. Enjoy, and share with those special teachers who have impacted you.

Watch Michael Chabon, Mary Glickman, and Pat Conroy speak fondly about particular teachers who supported them. "As a student, I had a lot of encouragement at crucial moments from teachers," says Chabon. Remembering her Catholic education, Glickman talks about a nun who would take her to museums in Boston and Conroy, who attended a military college, reminisces about a teacher, named ...

Your favorite show was on television. You had to walk the dog. You read the Cliff's Notes (or the review in the New York Times) and got the gist. And somehow, you never managed to actually read the book.

But when someone asks you about Bestseller X or Classic Novel Y at a dinner party, you fumble your way through the conversation and nod knowingly, right?

We consider ourselves smart, moderately well read folks. We’ve all got books that we meant to read—but just haven't gotten around to yet. We’ve got the best of intentions, but somehow there are ...

No need to be entering the classroom yourself to stock up on great literature! Here's our back to school sale for grown-ups. These titles are $3.99 and up through September 13. Whether you like short stories, memoirs, suspense, experimental fiction, or more, we've got a title for you! (And if you are looking for our children's sale, here it is!)

Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell

Fourteen stories that follow a young boy coming of age in a dysfunctional family in the rural South. Meet William Stroop, a young son of the South whose charming voice and mordant observations of family and culture ...

Maria Popova's 7 Obscure Children's Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature at Brain Pickings offered a fantastic look at the way some masters of language—Joyce, Twain, Woolf, Eliot, Shelley, Tolstoy, and Wilde—crafted offerings for younger readers. (If we were to add later twentieth-century novelists to the list, I'd suggest John Gardner's Dragon, Dragon, which, as Popova says of Tolstoy, exhibits a similarly "profound respect and appreciation for children’s unique creative and moral sensibilities, as well as his dedication to the broader aspirations of education." Read the piece and see some other excellent additions by commenters.)—Laura

I’m always fascinated by things like ...

John Gardner, author of the critically acclaimed novels October Light and The Sunlight Dialogues, was born seventy-eight years ago today. To celebrate his birth we've put together a photo album called "The Many Sides of John Gardner," which you can view below. The album demonstrates the breadth of Gardner's artistic abilities. Although he is known principally as a novelist and short story writer, Gardner also showed talent in other areas, including poetry, music, drawing, literary criticism, and teaching. "The Many Sides of John Gardner" explores all of these aspects of his life and more. You'll find excerpts from ...

This year for Father's Day we put together several original videos featuring interviews with the sons and daughters of Open Road authors. This week's archival photos continue our celebration of fatherhood. We invite you to flip through the photo album below to see candid photos of Open Road authors with their children or their own fathers.

Open Road Media wishes you a wonderful Father's Day weekend.

To celebrate, we’ve assembled four original videos featuring insightful commentary about growing up with literary fathers from the sons and daughters of Andre Dubus, Stanley Elkin, William Styron, Terry Southern, John Gardner, and James Jones. Catch glimpses of these great twentieth century literary giants through the eyes of their children, listen to tales of their filial devotion and love, and discover what these men were like in their ordinary lives.

Literary Fathers: Gardner, Elkin, Southern, Styron

Literary Fathers: James Jones and Andre Dubus

 ...

As Teacher Appreciation Month concludes, Open Road is proud to share a final tribute from bestselling author Alexandra Ivy

I’m always happy to admit that I loved school. Does that make me a nerd? I hope so! After all, it’s no accident that my desire to learn was instilled in me as a young child. There were many extraordinary teachers who influenced my life, and encouraged my natural curiosity. But Ms. Chambers (my high school English teacher) taught me there was more to learning than just good grades. It was because of her that I realized I had a creative ...

"For Gardner, writing was not a 'career.' It was not so pedestrian an enterprise as to be ranked among the various professions from which we might freely choose—doctor, lawyer, soldier or stockbroker. On the contrary, it was more like a calling." — Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage 

John Gardner is one of the most legendary creative writing teachers in the history of American literature. He pushed his students hard, demanding that they share his rigorous sense of craft and seriousness. He was known to spend hours poring over his students drafts right alongside them, regardless of the amount ...

Many of us at Open Road credit our teachers with instilling a love of reading in us at a young age. We are pleased to join our authors in celebrating those mentors whose patience, selflessness, and classroom heroism inspired us to do what we do for a living today.

Here's what's on the docket from Open Road for Teachers Appreciation Week. We'll come back and update this post with links as the new items appear on our blog and elsewhere. As always, feel free to share this content with friends and other readers!

• Hotel Angeline authors Jamie Ford, Kevin O'Brien, ...

This month Open Road will be joining folks around the country celebrating Jewish American Heritage. We'll be posting and distributing brand-new articles, photos, and videos about many of your favorite authors. Here's a sneak peek at what's in the works:

• A post honoring Mary Glickman, author of Home in the Morning, which explores the Jewish Southern experience 
• An Open Road Albert Einstein Ebook Sweepstakes
• A piece about  Ruth Gruber, author of Haven, and  Lucy Dawidowicz, author of The War Against The Jews, on the Museum of Jewish Heritage Blog
• New video featuring Raphael Yglesias...

In addition to being an accomplished novelist and critic, Gardner was also a talented illustrator and composer of light verse. In fact, Gardner’s first published work was a drawing that he submitted to Seventeen magazine while still in high school. He continued to draw and write poetry throughout his college years, ...

This week’s archival photo shows the writer John Gardner as a young man on his motorcycle in the early 1950s. He was a lifelong enthusiast of motorcycle and horseback riding, hobbies that resulted in multiple broken bones and other injuries throughout his life.

Gardner grew up on a farm in Batavia, New York. Both of his parents possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. As an adult, after years of struggling to get his work published, Gardner achieved widespread recognition with the release of his bestselling, critically acclaimed novel The Sunlight Dialogues. A remarkably ...

Sure, we talk about books all the time. But Open Road is plugged into the world beyond books, too. Each Friday we'll step outside of the industry silo to call out what caught our eye. Whether we're talking about technology, museum exhibits, education—and, yes, sometimes books—we're happy to share Links We Like with readers.

• Although I liked being a Girl Scout as a kid, I was always jealous of the adventuring the Boy Scouts got to do. Playing with bees? Swinging around giant rocks? Making fires? And, in 2011, building robots. According to NPR, the Boy Scouts have now ...