In a report at TechCrunch, MG Sielger reports: Okay, we know now that Amazon is on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. But last week, before we knew that, we got an interesting tip that such a move was coming soon — this…
Finally, someone has an interesting take on the spoof of the Time magazine cover story on Jonathan Franzen perpetrated by Tao Lin and the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger: While the Economist‘s “Prospero” blog notes the Stranger piece is “silly, and not exactly worth reading,” it…
In a review for the Washington Post, Michael Dirda notes that the newly translated Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy “provides a harrowing portrait of a marriage … not to mention a harrowing portrait of one of history’s most esteemed writers, Leo Tolstoy. He is so cruel…
Tao Lin, author of Richard Yates, details the contents of a bag of fruit.
Jacques Derrida discusses his anxiety about writing in the video below, from a 2002 interview.
Andy Stern, the recently retired “charismatic and revolutionary leader” of the Service Employees International Union who seemed to be headed for a position in the Obama administration, is being investigated by the FBI and the Department of Labor over a lucrative book deal, according to…
If you’ve been reading the book pages and the tech pages lately (or, more likely, book blogs and tech blogs), chances are you’re getting confused. There are some mixed messages out there. And so far the contradictions seem to exist comfortably with one another. Yesterday…
Yet again we are exploring the rich language and varied references that make Jean-Christophe Valtat‘s Aurorarama a novel of such layered delights. Today Valtat discusses the significance of the most famous prison ever invented, the panopticon: This word has been immortalized by Michel Foucault in…
Here at Melville House we’re excited to see whether stores are doing anything special to mark the Not the Booker nominations going on over at the Guardian. To update you swiftly, readers of the Guardian Books Blog were asked to nominate beloved books published in…
Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone has been celebrated by many famous publications and people, but in some ways this ecstatic blog post from 200 square-foot Argo Books in Montreal best captures the joy of discovering Fallada for the first time: HANS FALLADA. HANS FREAKING…
No less than 1,000 ancient Greek texts will be made available online by the British Library, with another 250 coming by 2012. Ranging from seminal editions of Aesop’s fables to the earliest known Christian Bible, aka the Codex Sinaiticus, the availability of this collection online…
Essayist Elif Batuman here takes aim at MFA programs in a London Review of Books piece titled “Get a Real Degree.” The essay, a review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, fires in particular at McGurl’s claim…
Much like tequila, Harlan Ellison is best when taken with a grain of salt. The celebrated writer of speculative fiction (he’d prefer you not call it sci-fi) has never been known to pull punches or beat around the bush and he certainly isn’t going to…
In case you missed it, The Los Angeles Times last week carried a rave review of How To Wreck A Nice Beach and an interview with its author, Dave Tompkins. The book is available from Melville House/Stop Smiling. A clip from the review, by music…
Everyone knows MobyLives is a fan of the book trailer. In our capacity as host of the Moby Awards we’ve seen quite a lot of them. They can be hilarious, terrible, bizarre and just plain…well, plain. And sometimes they even tell you something about a…
Another Banned Books Week is upon us and that means booksellers and librarians everywhere will be piling up copies of Catcher In The Rye, The Adventures Of Huckleyberry Finn, Ulysses, nearly every Judy Blume title, Harry Potter, and the list goes on and on. It…
NPR recently posted the prologue of Jean-Christophe Valtat‘s Aurorarama in their “Books We Like” section alongside Jessa Crispin‘s glowing review: [Aurorarama] entrances and delights. You could spend years picking apart the sly references and the particular myths, poems, novels and songs that inspired Valtat, or…
We return to Jean-Christophe Valtat‘s exotic and enchanting vocabulary in his novel Aurorarama, a vocabulary that often led our copy-editor to reach for her dictionary in confusion. theophany: a visible manifestation of God or a god. We asked Valtat to explain where he encountered this…
While there are a lot of book conventions and festivals in the US, there are few to compare to Toronto’s Word on the Street Festival, a massive, sprawling affair that takes over the city’s Queen’s Park near the University of Toronto. It’s open to the…
Tao Lin, author of Richard Yates, claims an office instead of bags at baggage claim.
“A group of single, working Latina moms in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago have decided to occupy a field house on their children’s school grounds slated for demolition, to demand it be turned into a library,” reports Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting,…
Damn it, Texas! The other day we had nothing but praises to sing for your forward-thinking ways. But now look at you. We turn our backs for a couple of days and then you go and do something so mind-blowingly stupid we may have to…
As part of his investigation of pricing agreements between publishers and Amazon and Apple, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal met with several of the states independent booksellers last Friday, according to a report on the website of the American Booksellers Association. Blumenthal asked the booksellers…
Once again, we turn to some of the marvelous and obscure language contained in Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama that baffled our poor copy-editor. hypnagogic: Of or relating to the state immediately before falling asleep. The word combines the Greek words for “sleep” and “abduction.” This time…
Most authors fear that their book will bomb–bad reviews, ignored by all, low Amazon sales. But Andrew Marr, BBC reporter and author of The Making of Modern Britain, had something new to contend with. According to an Associated Press report, “Andrew Marr’s latest book is,…
Seattle’s The Stranger alt-weekly decides to fight fire with fire via their latest cover (and its accompanying article) — a pitch-perfect take-off on Jonathan Franzen‘s Time magazine cover and article. Even the Stranger‘s cover text is exactly the same, except for one thing: “He’s not…
Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian presidential candidate who was kidnapped by FARC rebels and held hostage for over six years until she was rescued in a dramatic military sting operation, has published a book called Even Silence has an End, on her experience that landed Tuesday…
Remember Google Editions? It was/is the open source e-book platform by Google that was to be launched sometime during the summer. It was touted as a potential savior for independent bookstores and publishers alike, allowing each to more actively participate in the electronic book market.…
The smart, visually-oriented publishing blog The Casual Optimist shares this video from the multidisciplinary design firm IDEO, presenting three concepts for interactive reading experiences. So do these ideas represent the future of the book? While digital devices create a number of exciting possibilities for reading,…
What’s to be made? What should be saved? When’s all said and done, these are the only questions that define a culture. As was reported earlier this year, The Library of Congress has decided to archive every tweet ever tweeted. Recently, the British Library’s chief…
