Book News
Help for “The Help.”
Is there a novel reader in the U.S. today unfamiliar with “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel about three African-American maids and the white families who employ them in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s? It would be hard to miss the book, which has had a more or less permanent place on bestseller lists for about a year.
It wasn’t always that way, however. “I had been soliciting it, trying to find an agent, for two … years and got about 60 rejection letters,” the author told the Associated Press. Today, 15 months after the book’s release, “The Help” is being published in 35 countries and in three languages. It is also moving rapidly toward the big screen.
DreamWorks Studios has announced that shooting for “The Help” will begin late in July, mostly in Greenwood, Miss., a rural city of 18,000 in Mississippi’s Delta region.
The book is set in Jackson, Miss., but Greenwood appealed to the movie’s producers in part because of its reputation for “blues music and cotton fields.”
Stockett told the AP her “heart would be broken” if the movie, which will star Emma Stone and Viola Davis, were filmed anywhere other than Mississippi.
First Lines
South of Broad, by Pat Conroy
It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River.
He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and -bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula.
I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians.
Audio BestSellers
Fiction
1. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
2. Caught, by Harlen Coben
3. Deliver Us From Evil, by David Baldacci
4. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larssen
5. House Rules, by Jodi Picoult
Nonfiction
1. The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
2. 13 Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
3. Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner
4. Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Helperin
5. Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Publishers Weekly
