Rohinton Mistry is among the foremost of authors of Indian heritage who write in English. Living in Brampton, Ontario in Canada, Rohinton Mistry is a member of the Parsi Zoroastrian religion.
Rohinton Mistry was born in Mumbai, India on July 3, 1952. In 1975, Mistry moved to Canada after he received his degree in economics and mathematics from Bombay University two years earlier. For a while, he worked in a bank, and then he returned to school and earned a degree in philosophy and English. While he was at the University of Toronto, he received two Hart House prizes for stories published in the Hart House Review. In 1985, he also won the Contributor’s Prize of the Canadian Fiction Magazine.
Penguin Books in Canada published Rohinton Mistry’s first novel, a collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag in 1987. In 1991, Rohinton Mistry’s second novel, Such a Long Journey was published. For that novel, he won the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize as well as the Governor General’s Award. The novel was also translated into five different languages including Japanese, Danish, German, Norwegian and Swedish. The film adaptation, Such a Long Journey, was released in 1998.
If you are like me, you will probably read just about any book that crosses your path. I cannot help it I love books, all different types of books. Two of my favorite types of books to read are travel books and horror books. Therefore, I really fell in love when I came across a combination of both in some of the greatest books I have ever read.
Creepy Crawls: A Horror Fiend’s Travel Guide by Leon Marcelo is a travel guide to cinematic and literary horror locations. The book explores with spine-tingling detail vile movie locations, macabre as well as morbid city offerings. It tells of the resting place of Bela Lugosi and the haunts of Edgar Allen Poe. Within this book, you can travel to the spooky Maine locations that are featured in the works of Stephen King. The book includes travel tips, photographs and even trivia about hundreds of places all over the United States that have a horrific appeal.
Another book I truly enjoyed was Haunted Holidays by Laura Foreman. Haunted Holidays reveals the mysterious paranormal world in the United States. Spectral sightings are investigated with informative essays on everything from the witch haunts in Salem to the battlefields of the Civil War. It even has advice on techniques and tools for the wannabe ghost hunter.
So how did it begin all those years ago? The idea for Penguin Books was the brainchild of a gentleman by the name of Allen Lane, who was the creator of quality paperback in 1935 and the man who changed the world of childrens books and childrens poetry forever.
Puffin Books were first created in 1939. The one of the first Puffin Books was about a man who had broomsticks for arms by the name of Worzel Gummidge. Kaye Webb, the editor for Puffin Books, began the Puffin Club in 1967, promising to turn children into readers. The Puffin Club is just one of the ways that Puffin Books has won over the hearts of millions of readers and it is still alive and well to this day.
It is the hopes of everyone at Puffin Books that readers will look back on Puffin and smile. Either via a journey to Treasure Island or an adventure with Artemis Fowl or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Charlie Bucket. With all of the endless possibilities one thing remains certain, it does not matter if it is a picture book, paperback, hardback or sticker book, if it comes from Puffin Books it is sure to be great.