While former super-agent Bill Clegg is making lots of money right now off his book about how he screwed his clients and business partners by being a complete derelict, Claire Howorth, in this report for the Daily Beast, tells the story of another super-agent —…
How much some things have changed since the 1996 publication of Nicholas Negroponte’s bestselling book, Being Digital, can be measured by a snippet from a contemporaneous review by Roy Johnson. Near the end of it, Mr. Johnson pokes a little fun at some of Negroponte’s…
Raymond Scott, rare book dealer from Tyne and Wear, England, has pleaded not guilty to the theft and handling and transporting stolen goods, telling the police that was being framed by corrupt university staff, according to the latest report from the Independent. As the newspaper…
“Automatic-translation software has long been treated as a joke because of how hilariously it mangles phrases,” notes Clive Thompson. “But in the past few years, something has shifted: The technology is now surprisingly mature.” In a story from the new issue of Wired Magazine, Thompson…
Today is the 50th Anniversary of what is now an American classic: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. First published in 1960, Lee’s debut (and only) novel went on to be a national bestseller, win the Pulitzer, be made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Gregory…
It wasn’t a great day for Barnes & Noble yesterday, although it wasn’t exactly a disaster, either. According to this Reuters wire story,the company “reported a net loss of $32.1 million, or 58 cents per share for it fiscal 2010 fourth quarter ended May 1,…
Dan Gallagher at the Wall Street Journal reports here that Amazon.com is having more and more difficulty holding onto its lead position in market share for e-readers, a struggle that took a dramatic turn yesterday: “Despite its early lead in the fast-growing e-book market, Amazon.com…
In his New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof notes that an “ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras” and yes, some ebook readers — “are built from minerals that seem to…
Below, Sam Weller reports back from his recent appearance with Ray Bradbury and Black Francis at Glendale’s Mystery & Imagination Bookshop. Weller is the author of Listen to the Echos: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, which is out today from Stop Smiling/Melville House. More posts, and…
The sixth annual Library Book Cart Drill Team Championship was held Sunday afternoon in Washington, DC. It is just one of the many events held during American Library Association‘s annual conference. According to this report in the Washington Post, “Drill teams made up of library…
A new, in-depth report in Publishers Weekly by Karen Springen asks if children’s books are causing significant damage to the Indonesian rainforests. As Springen observes, “After all, it’s tricky to make good-looking four-color picture books from recycled paper, or affordable ones from virgin paper that…
In a short review of Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget, Nation magazine book editor John Palattella quotes one of the more bracing pieces of the book, which focuses on the “the hive mind spawned by the social-media technologies of web 2.0″ and what…
Catherine Lacey, former Melville House intern extraordinaire and now book correspondent for a number of venues, interviewed debut author Lee Rourke (The Canal, Melville House July 2010) for HTML Giant about his new book, the writing process, and the wildlife of Greater London. The full…
“When their former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, died four years ago, thousands of Chileans poured into the streets to celebrate — but that’s small potatoes compared to the crowds lining up to dance on the grave of traditional book publishing,” observes Laura Miller in a recent…
There are blurbs and there are blurbs. But, as a blog post at Conversational Reading puts it after getting an early reader’s copy of David Grossman‘s forthcoming To the End of the Land, “what the hell is up with this blurb, which is plastered right…
The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, has announced the winners of their prestigious annual book design competition “50 Books/50 Covers of 2009,” and we are very happy and proud to announce that three of those…
No, not the iPhone4 (besides, you can order the damn thing online anyway)! Something even better. The Salahis are shopping a book! Yes, the infamous White House party crashers have somehow managed to write a book and get an agent to shop it around for…
For the past few weeks, Josh Macphee over at Just Seeds has been publishing a great collection of anarchist and radical book covers in a blog series called “Judging Books by Their Covers.” There are a handful of Norwegian-published anarchist titles here; a cool set…
Count Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, had a Book of Mormon in the library at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, according to this article in the Mormon Times. “Frederick and Nataliya Felt were attending the Laurel Ward of the Silver Springs…
Okay, so it’s in French. Okay, so he doesn’t have the hair thing going on yet. But it’s him, I’m telling you — check out the eyes!
The article that everyone is talking about, “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings, won’t even be on newsstands until Friday. The piece, a profile of Stanley A. McChrystal, went live on the Rolling Stone website Tuesday, but by then it was already the talk of…
Glenn Beck’s latest foray into fiction, The Overton Window: A Thriller, is number 3 on Amazon’s bestseller list. It’s not on the New York Times list yet but as Jennifer Shuessler notes in an “Inside the List†column devoted largely to Beck, the novel was…
Hey! Melville House and MobyLives get some love on the Huffington Post. We’re featured in a survey of the best publishing websites — right up there with the big boys. Check out the post, and cast your vote (favorably, please) for us!
The story of an unlikely friendship between a writer and her elderly neighbor set against the evocative backdrop of a remote and beautiful coastal town in Maine, The Country of Pointed Firs is generally considered Sarah Orne Jewett‘s greatest work, and is soon to be…
It’s hard to quote a short passage from Susan Orlean‘s tiny New Yorker web-essay “Alphabet Soup,” which describes the author’s experience of having a book publishing by a large American publisher. One letter, after all, leads to another… but it’s a telling commentary on corporate…
Is no news good news? In a story at CNET today, reporter Tom Krazit reminds us that the Google Book settlement remains unsettled with no end in sight. At the last hearing concerning the case in February, presiding Judge Denny Chin, then of the Southern…
This October, a new YA novel fictionalizing the life of Anne Frank is being released by Houghton Mifflin. Four months out, it is already causing controversy. The latest cause for concern? The sexual content of the book. The UK press that is publishing the book…
Publishers Marketplace yesterday linked to the troubled Borders book chain’s most recent 8-K SEC filing, which discloses the company’s executive salaries. According to the filing Thomas D. Carney, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, got a raise and is now making $450,000 a year.…
Samantha Francis – David Davidar‘s former personal assistant at Penguin — has once again stepped forward to issue a statement of support for Lisa Rundle in her sexual harassment case against Davidar, by denying claims made by Davidar in his most recent statement (see the…
“O’s 2010 Summer Reading List†showed up in our email-boxes Friday — that’s from Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine —- promising twenty “Lush historical novels, wise contemporary tales and crowd-pleasing beach reads…†Last year at about this time MobyLives took a look at O’s Summer 2009…
