Jim Collins Books

[Elfreda Barrick]

CollinsBooks specializes in out-of-print, hard to find scholarly books in all fields, with special emphasis on history, art and anthropology of the world. Also, please make plans to attend our production of THE SEATTLE ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR on the second full weekend of every October.

There are many things we appreciate and admire about Brian Collins' mind, but a big one is his sincerity. When time and culture can make anyone a cynic, he is thoughtful, curious, passionate and rooted. His excitement about work and life is clear in this interview.

During my 30s, I got lucky and did okay in my career and stuff, so I was able to put some money away and bought a small house on Cape Cod for my mother. She never imagined such a thing was possible. She always wanted to have a cottage by the sea.

We will be the guests of Sir Tim Smit, founder The Eden Project in Cornwall, England. It is a magical project of epic ambition. They have recreated far-flung biomes in massive geodesic domes. Some have called it The Eighth Wonder of the World. I guess I will have to reimagine my sense of everything.

I would buy every piece of open wilderness and forest in the United States and put it into a private trust that protects it from being plundered. I would put a camp on the edge of it for everyone who works with us at COLLINS and anyone who would be interested in protecting such a place.

When I was ten, I stumbled across all of the original Wizard of Oz books in old stacks, covered with dust, inside the Duxbury Public Library. I read them all that summer and was re-born as a child of that library.

As for travel, I am writing this after driving across the top of the Andes with my colleague Eron Lutterman, far up above the clouds, in Ecuador. I am at a coffee shop in Cuenca right now because it is pouring, pouring rain outside. We just finished giving a talk here. Life is never meant to be lived in one place. Travel is like oxygen to me. Or, as my friends would say, like Oreos to me.

Traveling through Cairo on a foggy morning and heading out to the desert with my colleagues Ben Crick and Rob Auchincloss. We watched the Great Pyramid of Cheops appear like a mountain out of a thick, morning mist. I was unprepared for their immensity.

I have worked as a line cook, a waiter, a retail sales clerk at Christmas (never again), a house painter, a yard worker mowing lawns and a house painter over two crazy, hot long summers. All worthy jobs.

Suzanne Collins (born August 10, 1962)[2] is an American author and television writer. She is best known as the author of the young adult dystopian book series The Hunger Games. She is also the author of the children's fantasy series The Underland Chronicles.

Collins graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham in 1980 as a Theater Arts major.[8] She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1985 with a double major in theater and telecommunications.[9][10][11] In 1989, Collins earned her Master of Fine Arts in dramatic writing from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.[11]

Collins began her career in 1991 as a writer for children's television shows.[12] She worked on several shows for Nickelodeon, including Clarissa Explains It All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear, Oswald and Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!.[12] She was also the head writer for the PBS spin-off Clifford's Puppy Days.[12] She received a Writers Guild of America nomination in animation for co-writing the critically acclaimed 2001 Christmas special, Santa, Baby![13] After meeting children's author James Proimos while working on the Kids' WB show Generation O!, Collins felt inspired to write children's books herself.[12]

On June 17, 2019, Collins announced that a prequel to The Hunger Games would be released on May 19, 2020. It is based on the life of future President Coriolanus Snow, 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games trilogy.[24] On October 4, 2019 the title was revealed to be The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.[25] A film adaptation, starring Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird, was released on November 17, 2023.[26]

On June 6, 2024, Collins announced that a new prequel to The Hunger Games, set 24 years before the events of the main trilogy, would release on March 18, 2025.[27] The book, titled Sunrise on the Reaping, will explore the 50th Hunger Games won by Haymitch Abernathy.[27] Lionsgate procured the rights to adapt the novel into a film, which will release on November 20, 2026.[28]

In 1991, Collins met Charles "Cap" Pryor at the University of Indiana, and they married in 1992.[29] Pryor has been supportive of Collins's career, reading and critiquing the earliest drafts of The Hunger Games.[30] They live in the Sandy Hook area of Newtown, Connecticut with their two children, Charlie and Isabel.[6][30][31][29][32] Though Collins's IMDb profile claims she and Pryor divorced in 2015, this has never been confirmed.[6] Furthermore, Collins referred to Pryor as her husband in the acknowledgements of her 2020 novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.[33]

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Comments by Bob Corbett

April 2013Billy Collins seems to me a poet who writes poems for the sake of poetry itself -- the language, the expression, the images. I read some poets who are intellectually profound or with great sensibility of meaning of life or pain or joy or . . . But Collins seems to write for the poetry itself, the manner of expression, the images created. In general I think I ultimately prefer what I might call the poets of profound meanings, yet each time Ive come to one of Collins books I have enjoyed myself, read with delight, often with a smile or an inner wow over some image or line. I dont think hes ever challenged anything about my view of the world or reality. He is what he is and I am very thankful that he writes and publishes.The opening poem just delighted me to no end. Another Reason Why I Dont Keep a Gun in the House is about a barking dog that disturbs the poet, so he turns on a Beethoven symphony and plays it as loud as he can, but the dog barks even louder and soon enters into the symphony, winning its chair along with the orchestra. My brother lives next door to me and has exactly the dog of the poem, so, of course, I strained brotherly relations by hurrying over to his house to read him the poem.My number, as in my number is up is a marvelous short poem about approaching death. But Schoolville had me laughing out loud. It is an inside job about the way universities were, with an emphasis on the were.The Death of Allegory is a wonderful meditation on the contrasts of time; allegories dominating art and literature of the past, practical items which are lower case letters dominating the upper case.Forgetfulness begins:The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly become one you have never read, never even heard of . . .This poem was a joy to me. I am one who forgets in almost the exact manner he describes and if I didnt write about each book I read and then check my next book before I begin, I would be rereading books all the time.Some of these poems were in other volumes of Collins which I had already read, but as Forgetfulness suggests, I mainly read them as though I had never heard them before. However, thats not true of On Turning Ten. This is funny and cute and I remembered it well. In part it reads:You tell me it is too early to be looking back,

but that is because you have forgotten

the perfect simplicity of being one

and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.He follows through to his tenth birthday, which is supposedly when the poet is writing.I recognized other real favorites in this work Budapest, the marvelous Fishing on the Susquehanna in July, Marginalia and Splitting Wood.However, there were also many new poems to me which will now rise to the level of favorites such as Dharma about his dog, and then his playfulness with poetry by writing the poem Sonnet which is about writing a sonnet and is itself in sonnet form.Serenade was stunning. I dont know if the musician would win the woman he is trying to woo with his playing, but clearly the poet would win her with this poem.Another hilarious poem is Three Wishes which mocks the old notion of what if you had three wishes . . . In the end it takes him 7 to get his wish for the day.Perhaps The Movies is the poem that best speaks of the form of much of the collection. Like going to the movies, Collins is a spectator of life. He observes it, writes about it, but is never in danger, never involved, but at a distance writing about life in all its manifestations. The collection is a delight to read, and happily for me, I can come back to it relatively soon since I will have forgotten most of the poems and can enjoy then as though they were newly written.

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