THE COLLECTED STORIESHeinrich Böll
How to Keep Your Volkswagen AliveChristopher Boucher
“Tech snafus” at Amazon.com are costing more and more third-party retailers more and more moneys, according to a Seattle Times report by Monica Soto Ouchi. Prairie Lea Books, for example, sold 1,000 books in July, then saw that number drop by half in August. Proprietor…
They are some of the most colorful, popular, hardworking and legendary people in the book business: sales reps, the people who go into a book store on behalf of publishers or distributors and convince the buyer that customers are definitely, no question about it, absolutely…
First, Wal-Mart cancelled orders for Jon Stewart‘s bestseller America (The Book) because it contained a photo of naked bodies with the heads of Supreme Court justices pasted on them. Now, according to Sara Nelson in a New York Post report that uses “it’s” as a…
Until last year, few people in small, remote Motihari, India, had even heard of the most famous man ever born there: Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the name George Orwell. But then, “a troop of scholars and journalists arrived from New Delhi for the…
As mentioned in yesterday’s MobyLives news digest, it’s literary prize season, and this year’s winners of one of America’s more prominent set of literary prizes, the Whiting Writers Awards, were handed out in Manhattan at the New York Public Library last night. As a brief…
The first time Hungarian author Imre Kertesz met Americans, they were soldiers rescuing him from a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.” Now, 60 years later, the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature drew “cheers and a standing ovation” at his first-ever appearance here,…
It’s the biggest phenomenon in French book culture just now: The French book market is experiencing a glut of books “devoted to deciphering and explaining the other red, white, and blue.” According to Elisabeth Eaves in this report for Slate, “Parisian editors are dining out…
It was one of the first and most popular Internet book retailers, the place that spawned the webzine Salon—Borders.com, the online incarnation of the giant Borders bookstore chain. But the site eventually failed and was taken over in a deal with Amazon.com. Now, a Reuters…
While Borders tries to enter the British online market via Amazon, Abebooks, a rapidly growing player in Internet booksales, is entering the Spanish online market by purchasing a Spanish e-retailer. As Leigh Phillips reports in a story for Digital Media Europe, Abebooks announced “the acquisition…
You’ve probably noticed the non-stop hoopla of late: it’s literary award season, starting earlier this month with the awarding in Sweden of the Nobel Prize for literature, followed by the Booker Prize in England and, next month, the National Book Awards in the U.S. and…
Just when it seemed as if the endless promotion of even the merest trivia related to the The Da Vinci Code was, perhaps, starting to recede, by dropping the title of author Dan Brown‘s next book at a book industry function, his publisher, Stephen Rubin…
Stephen Dunn is about to publish his first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours in 2001. In an interview with Elissa Wald for Poets & Writers magazine, Dunn talks about his writing habits, what makes a good poetry teacher, and how winning the Pulitzer…
An American journalist who was kidnapped by Shiite insurgents in Iraq last summer has signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster. According to an Associated Press wire story, Micah Garen was kidnapped along with his Iraqi translator, Amir Doushi, from Nairiyah while taking pictures…
Announcing its third quarter results last week, Amazon.com tried to emphasize its pro-forma sales increase, but the rumbling amongst Wall Street analysts is that Amazon’s “days as a hot-shot dot-com may be behind it” because “the Internet retailer’s slowing growth makes its business suspiciously similar…
Among the celebrities politicking for the presidential candidates, some prominent literary types have started showing up on the campaign trail, too. In yesterday’s Reliable Source column in the Washington Post, Richard Leiby writes briefly that an appearance on behalf of John Kerry by John Grisham…
“Fiona Lam plans to seek out mothers in parks and pregnant passengers on the SkyTrain . . . . In Edmonton, Jannie Edwards and Wendy McGrath will read at the city’s Waste Management Plant.” Yes, it’s Random Acts of Poetry Week in Canda, and 27…
First, as it neared publication, it received worldwide publicity—as in this excited report by Clive Ellis and Neil Tweedie frm the January 31, 2003 edition of The Daily Telegraph. It reports that “The New Dictionary of National Biography” is “one of the most ambitious literary…
It seemed too good to be true—one of those oddball discoveries that make fiction writers scramble for a pencil: Calling themselves “The Vagabonds,” Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and Henry Ford, accompanied by naturalist John Burroughs, often “roamed the continent together on camping trips, roughing it,”…
She was two and a half hours late, but the author of the current bestseller How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Ann Coulter, isn’t known for being polite, and that probably isn’t why two men tried to hit her with pies while…
Late last month, marking the tenth anniversary of the first ever Furious Flower conference, a second Furious Flower gathering was held at James Madison University, with an all-star cast of poets including Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Ethelbert Miller, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri…
The Bloom County comic strip was huge in the 1980s, but weird. “Consider,” as Kathy Balog writes in this USA Today story: “The strip’s oddball cast of characters, who skipped between reality and the surreal, foreshadowed today’s mainstream mix of fiction and truth, even down…
He’s probably “he only designer that many book buyers can actually name,” notes Guy Dixon, which is part of what gives Knopf book designer Chip Kidd “a celebrity status, at least in publishing houses and graphic-arts departments, of rock-star proportions.” Then there’s the fact that…
His naked aggression to take over the presidency of his former mentor, Jacques Chirac, and his tactic of playing to the far right and calling himself pro-Bush, have made Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Finance Minister, a galvanizing figure in French politics. Now, he’s got a new…
“With fat biographies of sundry Founding Fathers appearing every other month and bookstore tables still piled high with odes to the Greatest Generation, the public’s appetite for the American past appears as healthy as ever,” observes Matthew Price. But in a Boston Globe article, Price…
In some of his greatest writing, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson covered the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, whom he famously savaged. Now, Thompson is back on the presidential campaign beat for Rolling Stone, and in this report, “Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004,” he finds himself…
Officials at Amazon.com were crowing last week at the announcement that the company had tripled its pro-forma profits for the third quarter, but as Melanthia Mitchell reports in an Associated Press wire story, shares of Amazon’s stock nonetheless “dropped to a 52-week low” late Friday,…
One of the hottest books in China right now is available only through the black market, although “bootleg copies are on sale everywhere”: China’s Peasants: A Survey has “proved so controversial,” reports Richard Spencer in a Daily Telegraph story, “that it was banned by the…
“A vicious and previously unpublished diatribe against Oscar Wilde by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas” is one of the things in an archive of material by or related to Wilde set to be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Friday. According to a report by John Vincent…
“While it has been suggested that Shakespeare dabbled with espionage and Catholic political activism,” a new, rather more radical theory about the Bard will be presented next month at the restored Globe Theater: that Shakespeare was an adherent of a sect of Sufism. According to…
There are a number of reasons why Elvis Costello has not been the subject of a serious biography. As Phil Hogan notes in a review for The Observer, “in the years since his gawky genius first excited the punk prophets of 1977, his career has…