I’m aware that Dennis doesn’t want this to be the kind of blog that publishes posts of the “Last night I got drunk and went to a book reading” variety. I agree with him absolutely — Mobylives is better than that. So, with that in…
Borders Group Inc. released its third quarter earnings statement yesterday and reported revenue dropped to $693.4 million — down from $765.2 million in the same quarter last year, and significantly less that the $726.5 million for the quarter analysts had predicted. Overall, sales fell 12.8%…
The last few days have seen a quickening increase in stories reflecting a rapidly and drastically worsening situation for the American book industry, combined with stories of some working hard to innovate their way out of it, and interspersed with possible instances of a more…
It is, says Joe Queenan, “the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic.” In an essay for The New York Times, he asks “how often does an author ever come out and admit…
The eccentric handwriting of Franz Kafka so impressed Finnish graphic and type designer Julia Sysmäläinen that she decided to create FF Mister K Pro, a font based on his “rather eccentric letter forms,” reports a blog post on The Font Feed. More precisely, the post…
A couple of people I know have been complaining about the death of the short story in the broadsheets. In the good old days, they say, the Books sections regularly included short stories from new and established writers and — here’s the rub — they…
British people are very grumpy about a lot of things. It’s part of our charm. One thing we’re especially worked up about is the 2012 London Olympics: surveys keep showing that increasing numbers of us don’t want the Olympics, resent the enormous costs, spit about…
A video blast from the past, courtesy of the terrific Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy and its star blogger Carolyn Kellogg: In what looks like mid-sixties Manhattan, Susan Sontag visits the architectural wonder the Seagram’s Building with its architect Philip Johnson, and with…
Jose Saramago is unstoppable. After a severe illness last year, when the local hospital was so worried that he might die that they didn’t want to admit him, the 86-year-old author has come back with gusto, finishing a new novel, The Elephant’s Journey as well…
A prominent Iranian scholar who is head of the UK’s Iran Heritage Foundation — “a charity he formed in 1995 to promote and perserve the history, languages and culture of Iran” — has pleaded guilty to mutilating at least 150 priceless books in the British…
More signs of the deepening impact of the current economic maelstrom upon the book industry, in this instance on the biggest publisher in the world: Random House, which Friday announced it was freezing the company’s pension plan program, and would not be offering any pension…
If the words “New York Review of Books” summon up a visual image for you, it’s probably of a drawing or design element crafted by the inimitable David Levine, the artist who, since the esteemed magazine’s inception in 1962, drew all of its famous, spiky…
In a column by Alvaro Fernadez, the website SharpBrains — “The Brain Fitness Authority” — considers how aging effects the evolution of “higher aesthetic tastes” by examining some surprising observations by Charles Darwin in his autobiography (available in its entirety, by the way, here) about…
While many supporters of Barack Obama (well, okay, me) find themselves abruptly brokenhearted, thoroughly disenchanted, and more than a little pissed off to discover that the phrase “change we can believe in” actually means “the Clinton administration we voted against,” others in the literary community…
A report in Variety notes that “Universal Pictures has made an overall deal with the estate of The Bourne Identity author Robert Ludlum that gives the studio exclusive rights to the Jason Bourne character and first look at other Ludlum novels.” Variety reports that the…
Why do politicians keep troubling us with their literary efforts? It’s ok when it’s Barack Obama (anything’s ok if you’re Obama) but see previous Moby posts ad nauseam for a list of people whose books you really don’t want to read. It’s not confined to…
Third quarter financials for Barnes & Noble, announced yesterday, were “about as bad as could be,” as Jim Milliot puts it in a Publishers Weekly report. Total sales fell 4.4%, to $1.1 billion, which amounted to a net loss of $18.4 million (as reported in…
The times are getting tougher and tougher and tougher. Last week over 15,000 jobs were lost in the UK, the majority of them in communication companies, and in a report in The Times today Rosie Lavan says the figure has risen to 24,000. That’s nothing…
A year after New Zealand author Wendy Nissen published a memoir called Bitch and Famous (“I was told it sold well”), she heard from her publisher. As she recounts in a column for the New Zealand Herald, he “said he had some copies left in…
Researchers in Warsaw, Poland, announced on Tuesday that they had discovered the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus, the great 16th-century scientist and writer (and priest) who first posited that the sun — not the earth — was at the center of the universe. It was a…
Well, was anyone surprised? Not by the fact that no independent publishers were represented among the winners of the National Book Awards announced last night — that, of course, is de rigeur — but by the fact that, despite lots of arched eyebrows and pointed…
When he reviewed Vladimir Nabokov‘s controversial novel Lolita, novelist Kingsley Amis cheekily asked, “Where’s all the sex, then?” As Stephen Smith of the BBC notes, “It was rumoured that ‘all the sex’ was in [Nabokov's] last book,” The Original of Laura. But no one has…
Twenty years after the death of the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, his German publisher, Suhrkamp, has announced a “sensational release” scheduled for next year — a previously-unpublished “prose text”by Bernhard. A report in the Austrian Times notes that “Bernhard was infamous for criticising Austria…
Irving Brecher, who wrote jokes for some of Hollywood’s greatest and most subversive comedians, and who once angered all-powerful movie producer Daryl Zanuck by telling him one of his films was so bad it hadn’t been released, it had escaped, died Monday in Los Angeles,…
His Holiness the Holy Father Pope “Eggs” Benedict XVI yesterday opened a new bookstore in Rome, the Pope Benedict XVI International Bookstore, located “just outside St. Peter’s Square,” according to a report by Cindy Wooden for the Catholic News Service. The new store will be…
A U.S. District Court judge has ruled in favor of four American text book publishers that “two foreign online booksellers are guilty of copyright infringement for illegally importing into the U.S. textbook editions that were produced only for distribution in overseas markets.” According to a…
While we await the deluge of books about Barack Obama, something to while away the hours: a comic book about Michelle Obama. A press release from Bluewater Productions announces the future First Lady will be part of its ongoing “Female Force” series, in an April…
Whether its music, films, or whatever, “content owners are finally realizing they’re better off helping their customers use digital media than trying to stop the march of technology,” and no where is this better exemplified than in the Google / AAP agreement, says L. Gordon…
Anyone who thinks that writers never get their hands dirty should read this report on Haaretz: Celebrated Israeli author Amoz Oz has joined 30 leading intellectuals to found a new leftist party in Israel. It’s necessary, he told a press conference, because “the Labor Party…
