In celebration of Mother’s Day, Open Road Media prepared a slideshow featuring wonderful images of famous authors and their mothers, taken from the authors’ personal collections. View it here!

In honor of National Poetry Month, listen to a moving reading of Savannah’s poem from Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.

Each year, dozens of books are made into movies—and dozens more optioned. Sometimes, the screenplay adaptation works out beautifully—but all too often, the book remains far better than the movie. Of course, we’re not suggesting that all of the titles in our Periodic Table of Books Into Film are better than their celluloid partners… a handful may be up to the challenge. What do YOU think? 

“I think only luddites would object to an ebook. An ebook is going to encourage reading.”

- Author Pat Conroy Powers Up his ereader and talks about why he loves ebooks. 

Great Reads with a Southern Drawl

For readers who love a glass of sweet tea or a mint julep, or whose ideal vacation would be a road trip through the heart of Dixieland, we have a perfect selection of ebooks ready for gifting. Take your recipient on a journey through the American South in these beautiful novels and story collections. Read samples here.

Happy Birthday, Pat Conroy!

In celebration, we’re featuring a photo album with images from Conroy’s childhood and adolescence as well as a video of Conroy, speaking about his mother and how she was the driving force behind his love of literature. “I cannot emphasize enough the way she encouraged me in a thousand different ways,” he says. View the album and video, here.

For Banned Books Week, we’re thrilled to share a collection of excerpts from our 30 featured ebooks! Find the story behind the spotlighted challenged, censored, banned, sued, and burned books, and click on the cover images to read an excerpt from the book.

“On my first night in Vienna, Jonathan Carroll walked me over to the Danube, where we sat on a flight of steps leading down to the river. The dog walkers were out in force. Greetings were exchanged with small movements of the eyes, and the dogs sniffed one another fondly… Jonathan kept his eye on a woman at the next bridge. She was moving so slowly I thought she might be leading a dogsled pulled by escargots. After an hour, the woman walked in front of us, and she bowed her head in acknowledgment of Jonathan. With great dignity, he returned the gesture. To my surprise, she was walking two enormous tortoises, displaced natives from an Ethiopian desert. The woman walked them every night, and Jonathan was always there to admire their passage.

‘That’s what writers do, Conroy,’ he said. ‘We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.’”

-Pat Conroy from “My Reading Life”

Pat Conroy, Writer

Happy Labor Day to all the creative types out there. May you always labor at what you love.

This 60s photo of Pat Conroy takes us to a different era of basketball (and basketball shorts.)