A day after throwing an ugly tantrum on Twitter about a (relatively) negative Boston Globe review of her new book, Alice Hoffman issued a classic politician’s apology late yesterday — the old conditional “I’m sorry if I offended anyone,” which is what she actually said,…
Amazon.com has lived up to its threat: It’s pulled the plug on dealing with any websites from North Carolina that make referrals to Amazon as part of the “Associates program” because it looks as if the state’s legislature is about to pass a law that…
Thanks to, oh, I dunno, the death of one of the biggest pop stars of all time … or you know, all that hell breaking out in — well, lots of places … or maybe just the Twitter meltdown of Alice Hoffman … the story…
Poor Farrah Fawcett — even at the end, she couldn’t hold on to a news cycle, losing out to a guy who had even worse influence on hair culture and cosmetics than she did. However, thanks to a posthumous revelation (pointed to by that great…
“Whatever happens, nothing will be the same in Tehran.” So begins French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy‘s wide-ranging “Message to the Young People of Iran.” In a video posted last week, Levy, author of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? and War, Evil, and the End of…
A British publisher has announced that because so many retailers have asked him for it, he’s crashing a book about Michael Jackson. According to a report on The Bookseller by Catherine Neilan, the indie publisher John Blake will be releasing the ingeniously-titled Michael Jackson — King of…
Not too long ago, when Doug Dutton was still running Dutton’s Bookstore and was still the king of Los Angeles’ indie bookstore scene, he was at a dinner with people from other area bookstores including Book Soup and Skylight. ”Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in…
A Turkish court has acquitted writer Nedim Gursel of “inciting religious hatred” in his novel Daughters of Allah. As Sebnem Arsu details in a brief New York Times report, “The case came to trial after Ali Emre Bukagili, a member of a group that has…
As one scholar has noted of one of Ernest Hemingway‘s most popular books, A Moveable Feast, “There can be no final text because there is not one.†That is, while Hemingway had begun to assemble his stray writings about his time in Paris into some order,…
The ex-manager of musician Tom Waits is suing Random House for $1 million in general damages and an undetermined amount in punitive damages, as well as corrections to be made in the book, over claims made about him in a biography of Waits released last…
In New York City, “The Womenomics rocket ship blasted through town recently, leaving a trail of you-go-girl in its wake,” observes Sheelah Kolhatkar in a New York Magazine report. She notes that the “slim little book, co-authored by Good Morning America correspondent Claire Shipman and BBC…
A growing array of state governments are going after Amazon.com because of its “tax avoidance schemes”: A week after the company threatened legislators in North Carolina and Hawaii for contemplating “legislation that would force e-commerce companies to collect tax if they have online marketing affiliates…
After days of silence from the press and the principals in the W.H. Smith – Penguin deal, the head of the UK’s Society of Authors has “voiced his concerns in a letter to Penguin Group chairman and chief executive John Makinson” and asked him to…
In the face of mounting criticism of the deal they crafted with Google granting the internet behemoth complete and exclusive control of “orphan” books — books that are out of print but not out of copyright — the Association of American Publishers and the Authors…
Before he proved himself just another politician with his brains in his pants, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford had a deal with Penguin’s conservative imprint Sentinel — and by the way, does any conglomerate press have what they’re calling a liberal imprint? — as Michael…
It was a classic position author/journalists often find themselves in, explains Melville House author Michael M. Thomas: “The esteemed editor of this Opinions section had barely finished expressing his regret that, as a close personal friend, he couldn’t review my new novel, Love & Money…
Today is poet Frank O’Hara‘s birthday. He was born on this day in 1926. Below is a clip of O’Hara reading “Having a Coke with You”. It is a beautiful example of his casual, seemingly effortless style — a style which carried with remarkable lightness…
The Armenian Weekly reports that this Friday, June 26th, a Turkish translation of the much contested “Blue Book,” the famous 1916 report by the British government entitled, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16 , will be published in Ankora by Lord Avebury…
Wired editor Chris Andersen was the talk of the book biz yesterday, due to the too-ironic-to-believe revelation that his forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (one of those only-in-big-publishing projects: a $26.99 hardcover that talks about things such as information wanting to…
British online book retailer The Book Depository is coming to America, according to a report on The Bookseller and, as George Murray of Bookninja fames puts it, it’s got Amazon.com “hearing that submarine ping sound.” That’s because the site has grown rapidly in popularity since…
Well, if one has to date online, I guess this would be the best way to go about it. Last summer, Penguin UK teamed up with Match.com to start “Penguin Dating,†a service that pairs people up by the books that they enjoy, instead of…
A few weeks ago critic and translator James Marcus shared an original dance track with MobyLives that samples the laughter and “Jewish shouting†of Philip Roth. Back in September, Marcus profiled Roth for the Los Angeles Times, and he asked Roth what he thought of…
As per this earlier MobyLIves report, former vice president Dick Cheney and his cronies must have gotten their stories straght: Cheney yesterday inked a book deal with Simon & Schuster for a memoir due out in the spring of 2011, for an advance said to…
A major player in the John Edwards sex scandal is about to dish. Andrew Young, the longtime Edwards associate who claimed to be the father of the child born to Edwards’ girlfriend Rielle Hunter, is shopping a tell-all to New York publishers that “would chronicle…
Most book publishers take a lot of pride in — and spend a lot of money on — well-designed covers. Author photos, too, can take more thought and money than the average reader may suspect. But as a recent post on the New Yorker‘s book…
Booktrade.info posts an announcement from one of the world’s better-known and oldest bookstores — the Brentano’s in Paris: Dear Friends, It is with sadness, and astonishment – despite the prolonged agony of these last months – that we inform you of the official closing of…
This is Eric Schlosser in the Colbert Report green room. Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, was on the show to promote Food, Inc., which he co-produced. The best part, though: Check out what McDonald’s Grimace character is reading—Harper’s Magazine The Colbert Report Mon…
Perseus Books Groups, the conglomerate of publishers that includes Basic Books, Da Capo, and Public Affairs, and controls some 80 percent of independent book distribution via its ownership of Publishers Group West and Consortium and that is itself owned by the hedge fund Perseus LLC, has announced…
The book packager Inkwell Publishing Solutions is apparently out of business. According to Jim Dwyer’s New York Times report from Friday, the company, which specializes in developing textbooks, has closed its offices and turned the lights off. According to the Times, “The phone rings and…
“An appellate court ruled Friday that book publisher Simon & Schuster might have violated federal law by allegedly sending unsolicited text messages promoting Stephen King‘s Cell,” according to a report by Wendy Davis on Mediapost. “The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that sending SMS…
