These anthologies collect the greatest speeches in history, invaluable for any writer:

The World's Great Speeches

Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

Words That Shook the World

The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches

Great American Speeches

We asked Bob Greenman, the author and educator we interview in this week's "Teachers at Work" feature, to recommend books about vocabulary. Here are his picks:

America in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf and David K. Barnhart. "Year by year, the stories behind significant American words like cookie (1703), squatter (1788), hobo (1847), bathtub (1870), muckraker (1906), jukebox (1939), duh ( 1963) and newbie (1993)."

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The National Book Critics Circle announced its nominations for its prestigious annual awards earlier this month. Categories include fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism. Winners are announced on March 6th -- so hurry up and read everything before the results! Here are the fiction finalists:

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

"O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" On the World Wide Web, that's wherefore! Teaching Shakespeare, studying Shakespeare or just interested in the Bard's classics? Check out these websites:

Shakespeare Online

Everything Shakespeare

The Hamlet Site

Shakespeare and Food

Since 1922, a division of the American Library Association awards the Newberry Medal each year to the top American literature for children. The 2008 winner and honor books were announced earlier this month. They are... drum roll, please...

Winner
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz

Honor Books
Elijah Of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmid

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

When I began No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, I didn't expect it to be a memoir at all. It was going to be me telling my mother's story of being a cop on a 1980s serial murder investigation. New to nonfiction, I wasn't sure if it should be a biography or a true crime story. Interviewing my mother helped me figure out exactly what story I was going to be telling. I also spent time looking through a box of files, notes and pictures she kept about the case, expecting someone eventually would write about it. She had hoped it would be me, but I resisted for years because I was a novelist, though I hadn't yet sold a novel.  Continue reading...