After MidnightIrmgard Keun
Faithful RuslanGeorgi Vladimov
When he declared Illinois would stop doing business with the Bank of America, Governor Rod Blagojevich ratched up attention to the story of the Republic Windows and Doors takeover. When he was arrested the very next day, his own story almost blotted out that of…
So Reed Exhibitions Canada has been having trouble with publishers large and small withdrawing from its BookExpo Canada convention, and seemed on the verge of having to cancel it entirely when the biggest of the big, Random House Canada and Penguin Canada pulled out (see…
The Associated Press reports that “British police charged a book dealer Wednesday with stealing a rare First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays from a university library a decade ago.” Originally stolen from a display case in Durham University Library in the UK back in 1998,…
With all the discussion of the coming demise of the print edition of the Washington Post Book World, here’s something to remember: this happened once before. According to a report in today’s Washington Post, The Post created Book World in the 1960s, with its first…
So, you want to write a book? “How hard can it be?” asks Alex Beam of the Boston Globe. An experienced author himself (his newest is A Great Idea at the Time, about Mortimer Adler‘s campaign to sell the “Great Books” door-to-door), Beam’s newest column…
Indie publishers walking the streets of the big city are hearing it a lot these days: “You guys are the ones who are going to survive this thing.” The idea seems to be that indie publishers have some form of lessened exposure to the financial…
They received a massive amount of your taxpayer money in the first bailout, but what do you know about the Bank of America? In the latest installment of her ongoing Melville House “Live Book” project, Kari Lydersen looks into one of the key players in…
It started on Monday, when Amazon.com “notified its publisher and author clients that it plans to cease offering e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe e-book formats,” as Calvin Reid reported in a dispatch for Publishers Weekly that was so brief it was as if…
Carolyn Kellog, keeper of the LA Times‘ blog, Jacket Copy, has a mellifluous and scintillating paean to the hundred most beautiful words in the English language as selected by the site alphDictionary. According to Kellog, “There is a plethora (on the list) of words whose…
Roberto Bolaño is one of the most outlandishly unorthodox writers to hit the mainstream literary big time in quite a while, but the New York Times wants to know if the great Chilean writer was — what, was he on Oprah or something? — a…
Put the title of a book into the search window and what do you get? Right, its Amazon page. Or, if you’re using Google, maybe its Google Book page. If you’re lucky, its Powells.com page. And then a bunch of other pages of places that…
New York Times book reporter Motoko Rich reports on the Times‘ arts blog that sources are telling her the Washington Post “has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other…
John Updike, one of the most celebrated authors in American literary history, as admired for his poetry, essays and criticism as for his novels, memoirs and short stories, died this morning of lung cancer at the age of 76. As a New York Times obituary…
In the latest installment of ongoing Melville House “Live Book” project, Kari Lydersen continues to investigate something that may have been at the heart of the revolt on Goose Island — wage theft …. Every day across America, thousands of people are falling victim to…
A day after still more layoffs at one big publishing institution — see yesterday’s story about Publisher’s Weekly — rumblings of more departures, albeit invited departures this time, and another major player: HarperCollins yesterday launched a campaign to get more of its employees to voluntarily…
The famous medieval manuscript library, The Abbey Library of St. Gall, is underway developing a virtual library of all 400 of its priceless texts and manuscripts dating from before 1000 BC. The program, with the catchy name of “Codices Electronici Sangallenses,” currently provides access to…
It was big news — the first major rumble that would turn into an earthquake the very next day — when publisher Becky Saletan walked from her job at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (rumor has it, because she was ordered to fire, among others, legendary editor…
The Guardian puts it best: “Gaul Albert Uderzo, creator of Asterix, has rounded on his daughter over her accusations that he sold out by ceding control of the comic book series to a major French publisher.” As reported earlier on MobyLives, Sylvie Uderzo had published…
In the newest installment in her Melville House Live Book Project, Kari Lydersen investigates the behind-the-scenes role of the Illinois attorney general in the negotiations over the future of the Republic Doors & Windows workers … Chicago, January 27, 2009 — Illinois Attorney General Lisa…
In another move so drastic and ill-considered that it seems to signal yet another major institution of American publishing is on the verge of death because its foreign-conglomerate ownership wants out of the book busines, Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly was…
Quick: Who’s the one writer you’d think wasn’t going to win the top prize (and sort of wholesome imprimatur) in children’s literature, the Newbery Medal? Of course, it’s Neil Gaiman. However, he did. A shocker, perhaps, to those of you who watched his charged interplay…
It started as a festival to celebrate a unique town in Wales that seemed to consist entirely of secondhand bookstores. Now, the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival has grown into a wildly successful, internationally acclaimed annual event … and the booksellers of Hay say it’s killing them.…
Who says law and order are on the decline these days? Not in Jessup, Iowa, thank you very much, where a woman has been arrested for an overdue library book. The Des Moines Register reported that Shelly Koontz was arrested for having kept The Freedom…
The economic crisis that’s been whacking the conglomerate publishing and bookselling scene has finally gotten to the university press world, with two of the largest and most prestigious announcing big cuts over the last few days. First, as a Publishers Weekly report by Andrew Albanese…
President Barack Obama is moving fast to restore transparency in the Executive Branch, and confidence in the nation’s libraries and archival systems. On his first day in office, he made two major decisions with a significant impact on how we regard our libraries and other…
Now that Barack Obama has been elected president, novels such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Of Mice and Men “have to go” because they “use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly,” says a high school English teacher in Washington state. In an…
A new kind of illiteracy is confronting more and more seemingly educated people these days: the inabilty to read handwritten text. In a Wall Street Journal article, Cullen Murphy discusses the observation by Kitty Burns Florey in her new book Script & Scribble: The Rise…
“We’re on a mission to flush out the brightest, freshest new writing talent around.” It’s a nice tagline but Authonomy is a weird site. Set up by HarperCollins to help writers find their feet, its premise is that novelists can put their work out there…
Yesterday was the birthday of the bard of Scotland, Robert Burns, and as you raise your glass to him tonight, How’s Your Drink? author Eric Felton suggests two things to remember in a Wall Street Journal column: One, never call him “Bobby” Burns or, if…
In the newest installment in her Melville House Live Book Project, Kari Lydersen looks closer at one of the key players in the story … Chicago, January 23, 2009 — Following our previous backgrounder on the UE union, here are the basics about another key…