After MidnightIrmgard Keun
DebtDavid Graeber
Lord Dennis Stevenson, the chairman of British media conglomerate Pearson is stepping down, leading to hightened speculation that it will sell off one of its primary assets: Penguin Books. As a Times report by Mark Kleinman details,” during his eight years as chairman Pearson has…
In a new book being hitting bookstores in France today, author Mazarine Pingeot says “The late French President Francois Mitterrand lived for much of his 14 years in power not at the Elysee palace but at the home of his mistress and their illegitimate daughter”—none…
In her first extended interview, Anita Thompson, the widow of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, says the writer “began saying that suicide wasn’t a dishonorable thing a few months before he shot himself. . . .” In an interview with Dan Elliott of the Associated Press…
In a report that follows up on a story previously on MobyLives, an Associated Press wire story says, An environmental group that owns the former home of Ernest Hemingway where the author shot himself “has rejected an offer from neighbors to buy the property, setting…
Two Key West bars feuding over their connection to Ernest Hemingway have reached a settlement. According to an Associated Press wire story, “From 1933 to 1937, Hemingway’s friend “Sloppy Joe” Russell ran a bar in a former city morgue. Russell moved his business half a…
Turn of the century novelist Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins has long been celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women’s literature. In fact, when Henry Louis Gates discovered one of her books, Four Girls At Cottage City, he was inspired to track down other “lost” texts by…
“Dozens of cannon owners, from Civil War re-enactors in Pennsylvania to an Eagle pilot, who has specified in his own will that he be shot posthumously from a cannon, have offered the use of their weapons to Hunter S. Thompson‘s family” in order to fulfill…
“After years in the literary underground, “street lit” — a sort of hip hop black literature that is often self published and sold on U.S. street corners — may finally hit the big time,” says Diane Bartz in a Reuters wire story. ” Religion, obsession…
Dr. Nathan Wright Jr., the author of seminal texts about the Black Power movement of the 1960s such as Ready to Riot, who was also a life-long Republican and strongly supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has died. Wright, 81, died from kidney disease at…
After attending a recent conference on Jacque Derrida, Scott McLemee is prompted to recall that, “As it happens, Derrida himself became somewhat put out with the initial reception (and domestication) of his work by literature departments. As early as 1980, he referred to deconstruction as…
Sales of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson‘s books are “soaring,” according to an Associated Press wire story. The report says Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for example, have lifted it to number 15 on the Amazon.com bestseller list, and the book’s publisher, Vintage, is…
Civic authorities in the German state of Bavaria, which holds the rights to Adolf Hitler‘s book Mein Kampf, say they are “seeking legal action to prevent the book from being published in Poland.” According to an Associated Press wire story, “The book, which details the…
The head of the national library in France, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, has raised a “war cry” over plans by Google to put the collections of some of America’s leading libraries on line. As a Reuters wire story reports, Jeanneney says, “It is not a question of…
“This . . . is a plaintive cri de coeur, asking why, still, publishers allow booksellers to return books for full credit—or is it that booksellers require publishers to accept the return of books for full credit? Does anyone even know? If the origins of…
On April 23, 400,000 books will be sold in Barcelona as part of the annual, ritualistic celebration of a holiday combining the death dates of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, UNESCO‘s declaration of the date as International Book Day, and the feast day…
“I have grown furtive at the keyboard, no longer able to look my staff in the eye as I plot what to drop,” says the unnamed “stockmistress” of the QI Bookshop in Oxford, England. ” The open-to-buy system — which allows me to purchase only…
A set of letters written by Percy Bysshe Shelley protesting his expulsion from Oxford for “writing a pamphlet about atheism” has been discovered, and rescued, just before being put up for sale in a ‘car boot sale” in England. According to a BBC wire story,…
The woman who “ascended to the role of Putnam president” three years ago—when Phyllis Gran “left in a kerfuffle” with corporate partner Penguin and parent company Pearson—is herself, “walking out the door”—due to a “kerfuffle” with Pearson of her own, one source says in a…
If the final instructions of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson are followed out, “the body of the late maverick journalist will be cremated this week and his ashes blasted from a cannon across his sprawling ranch in Woody Creek, Colo.,” reports David Abel in a Boston…
“For many Jerusalemites, and no doubt for many visitors to the capital, there was a distinct sense of relief” at this year’s 22nd International Book Fair in Jerusalem, says Atira Winchester in a report for the Jerusalem Post. She says that “After the slump in…
“In a brave move, the Royal Mail has chosen to mark the 150th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë‘s death by selecting an unorthodox image of [Jane Eyre's] eponymous heroine for a special commemorative stamp issue” due out tomorrow. A Guardian report by Vanessa Thorpe says the…
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cervantes Prize-winner who was a political exile from his native Cuba, died in London on Monday at age 75. A brief Agence France Presse report, says that according to his French publisher, the writer, whose novels include Three Trapped Tigers and…
The Sameseong Museum of Publishing in Seoul is staging a show of books that have been banned in Korea’s recent past. As Kim Joo-young reports in a story for Yonhap News, many of the “scores” of books on display were banned during the Japanese occupation.…
“Here’s something weird,” writes author Stephen Elliott. “My father, who was an awful and abusive father, is leaving bad reviews of my books on Amazon.com.” In a short essay on his website, he details the one-star review (headlined “Awful”) and says, “If there’s a lesson…
Charges have been filed in Turkey against novelist Orhan Pamuk telling a Swiss newspaper that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians had been killed in Turkey,” which is “a statement argued to constitute a crime according to the Turkish Penal Code,” says a Turkish Daily…
The “cheatfest” continues at The University of Iowa, says an unattributed report at Foetry.com, which notes that for one of the school’s recent awards, the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, the judge was an Iowa graduate who chose, well, an Iowa Workshop graduate. For another…
Rolling Stone wasn’t exactly known for political reporting when Dr. Hunter S. Thompson began writing for it. Now, in this remembrance, the magazine’s James Sullivan remembers the publication’s most famous contributor, and how he once said that “his realization that he could ‘get away with’…
The recent death in Russia of poet Tatyana Bek “has led to speculation that a falling-out with her fellow poets provoked her to commit suicide,” according to a Moscow Times report by Victor Sonkin. The falling out concerned the announcement by poet Yevgeny Rein and…
Late Friday the long list of the 18 nominees for the first ever International Book Prize were announced—not in England but in Washington DC, where American writer John Casey, chair of the judging panel, declared the $115,000 prize would become an “important part of the…
A “sharp fall in revenue” at Harlequin Books has parent company Torstar Corp. worried. According to a Globe & Mail report by Richard Blackwell, “The romance fiction publisher has been suffering from soft sales, and investors are holding their breath to see how — and…