“The Shock Doctrine is a brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time.” With these words, China Mieville, chair of the judges for the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing, recognised Naomi Klein’s latest work as the most brilliantly complex…
Three American men who were held hostage for five years in the jungles of Colombia by leftist guerillas with French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt have released a book that is critical of her behavior during their time in captivity together. According to an AP wire story…
Another reason not to buy the Kindle: a story in the Bookseller reveals that The Daily Mail (purveyor of all things reactionary and unpleasant to middle Britain) is planning to distribute its web content on the infernal device as soon as it becomes available in…
This BBC story has reminded me why I refused to study linguistics in any shape or form while doing a modern languages degree. It may seem a counter-intuitive decision but one day I stumbled into the library to find a friend writing an essay on…
Here’s a guest post from Wayne Roberts, whose No Nonsense Guide to World Food is, as I’ve said before, a cracking introduction. Hopeless Romantics Do Valentine’s Day Chocolate One Better Oaxaca, Mexico By Wayne Roberts Traipsing through the jungles of Mexico in January with Michael…
So, what is he like, this Monsieur Bezos, this man who would take over the world, this man who wouldn’t give a damn if all publishers and writers keeled over dead, this, this, this … Jeff? Well, he’s got a hell of a laugh to…
Philip José Farmer, the popular (and prolific) science fiction author who “shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens,” has died at the age of 91 at his home in Peoria, Illinois. A New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas says that Farmer…
Richard Nash, who as publisher of Soft Skull Press became known as one of the most dynamic and innovative independent publishers in New York, has announced he’s leaving the company on March 10. Nash had been forced to sell the company two years ago in…
Amazon promises that “now Kindle can read to you.” But divided opinion over whether Amazon’s Kindle 2 Text-to-Speech function infringes on authors’ and publishers’ audio rights is unlikely to be united by the inevitable court battles. In this op-ed for the New York Times, Author’s…
“It’s a case of Twittering while Rome burns,” according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post. As detailed in his Post column, a slew of congressional members Twittered their way though President Obama’s speech on Tuesday. How about a sampling of some of their comments?…
The media attention to President Obama‘s use of language may seem unprecedented, if only because his comparative eloquence follows eight years of an inarticulate and deliberately evasive administration. But George W. Bush got his share of attention. His utterances gave rise to a new word,…
Oh, books about publishing. People in the industry like them, or at least some of us do. But do regular folks? This was the question taken up in a February 10th story by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer. In the article, Neyfakh questioned…
Only people in places without TV or the recently deceased can be unaware of the phenomenon that is Slumdog Millionaire: the fact that it is one of only eight movies ever to win eight Oscars; that the street children who acted in it have been…
We’ve had chick-lit, hick-lit, Brit-lit and prick-lit; misery memoirs, mummy memoirs, country memoirs and hunting memoirs. The French have their own brand new area, supermarket-lit: The Tribulations of a Checkout Girl has been a big hit across the Channel. The financial crash has spawned another…
“I’d hardly settled behind my desk when one of my bosses asked if I would join her in the corner office. ‘Please close the door,’ she said as I entered the room. Seldom a good sign. ‘Why don’t you take the comfortable chair?’ Oh dear.…
I know I spat corrosive vitriol about several Guardian Books series recently. I stand by those comments (but not the grammatical mistake that someone kindly pointed out). As if to spite me, they’ve just started a new one called “Writers reflect”, which sounds like more…
So she’s the most powerful literary agent in the history of mankind. So she’s legendary, feared, reviled, loved — even more than the jackal, Andrew Wylie. So she “made” Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and a lot of other writers I don’t much fancy…
So she’s the most powerful literary agent in the history of mankind. So she’s legendary, feared, reviled, loved — even more than the jackal, Andrew Wylie. So she “made” Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and a lot of other writers I don’t much fancy…
Well, now we know: “Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has agreed to a three-book deal with Crown Publishers, starting with a memoir about her years in the administration of President George W. Bush,” reports Hillel Italie in an Associated Press wire story. The deal…
Oh my. As many as 2,500 languages are in danger of becoming extinct. Given that a person who can speak three or four languages is considered to be multilingual, it’s mind boggling to think that there can be that many individual dialects in the world,…
Australian writer Harry Nicolaides has been released from a Bankok prison, where he’d been serving a sentence for violating the country’s lese-majeste laws when he insulted the Thai royal family in his novel, Verisimilitude (as previously reported on MobyLives). He was sentenced to be in…
Stacey Levine is the author of the novels DRA— (Sun & Moon, 1995) and Frances Johnson (Clear Cut, 2005). Her second story-collection, The Girl With Brown Fur, will be published by MacAdam Cage in March. Her website is here. Tao Lin interviewed her for MobyLives…
Edward Upward, “the last living link was broken to writers like Isherwood, W.H Auden and Stephen Spender who shaped English literature in the 1930s,” has died in Pontefract, England at the age of 105. As a New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin observes, with…
It’s an international incident and a fantastic book launch all rolled into one! Here’s the latest on the Dubai Book Fair book-banning brouhaha. (For the backstory see MobyLives, here.) Margaret Atwood, Booker-winning author and PEN International VP, writes in the Guardian that basically, she was…
More bad news from the nation’s second largest bricks-and-mortar retailer: Late last week the beleaguered Borders Group Inc. “marked another painful milestone in its quest to downsize and cut costs Thursday when it laid off 136 people, including 94 in Ann Arbor,” as the hometown…
The alteration of works of literature is always a tetchy subject. Purists and quite a lot of the general public are vehemently against it, on the fairly self-evident grounds that tampering with someone else’s immortal words is unjust, wrong and often makes things worse. Some…
There’s been a brief respite in book prize announcements on this side; long enough for everyone to send their party clothes to the dry cleaners and do a little detoxing before the next round. These things never last long, however. On Friday, the Bookseller published…
More news from the Israeli International Book Fair. Following on the heals of Haruki Murakami’s win of the Jerusalem Priz, reported earlier on Mobylives, Agence France Presse reports that Alain Mabanckou has won the French-Israeli Literary Prize for his novel, Broken Glass. First published in…
The first Best Translated Book prize was announced at Melville House in Brooklyn last night, to a packed house made up of some of the independent publishing scene’s leading critics, translators, editors and booksellers. Among those in attendance were New Directions head Barbara Epler, New…
Norway yesterday launched a year of celebrations in honor of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Knut Hamsun, its Nobel Prize-winning native son who died destitute and disgraced because of his support of the Nazi regime that took over his country. As this Agence…
