December 20, 2010

Happy Holidays

Melville House and MobyLives are offline for the holidays. We’ll be back in early January. Until then, our best wishes to all our readers and thanks for your support in 2010. See you next year!

December 17, 2010

Beyond "Best Of": Melville House and the Indie Lists

The years draws to a close and we’re all awash in best-of book lists and holiday gift books suggestions. These lists are simultaneously addictive and so abundant as to render themselves meaningless. Largehearted Boy has undertaken the thankless task (though we do thank him for it) of…

Anatomy of a book design: On teachers and bankers

This is the eighth installment of a series by artist Mahendra Singh on the process of adapting Lewis Carroll’s classic nonsense poem, The Hunting of a Snark, into a graphic presentation. Like most of Carroll’s work, this poem has seen various iterations since it was written in…

In the margins with Sam Anderson + Melville House book giveaway contest

What does a fine literary critic scribble in the margins of the books he’s reading? Well, “OMG” and “LOL” and “Motherfuck” all make appearances… alongside, of course, deeper sentiments. Over at The Millions Sam Anderson (who, review by review, inches towards becoming my favorite contemporary…

3D pulp fiction

Ah, the web slideshow. One of the great daily indulgences you can slip in and out of at work, not spend a lot of time on, and yet in that brief stretch you have managed to discover something interesting. Of all the websites devoted to…

Heinrich Böll: Revisited

As the many many new fans of Hans Fallada‘s Every Man Dies Alone might already be aware, Melville House has developed something of a reputation for rescuing authors from literary neglect. (Indeed, one of our distributor reps has nicknamed us “Melville Haus.”) Heinrich Böll might seem an unlikely…

Inaugural Blog Tour: Richard Yates

More and more, we find ourselves in awe of the quality, depth and variety of places on the internet talking about books. Thus, we’ve decided to take a year-end look at how those places talked about our titles. (Read the kickoff.) The point is to…

Day in Review

Geek Test – the Guardian Review Literary Quiz “Googles launches new book database” – this is NOT Google books + a cool new Google labs tool that charts word use over time “Ten Great Poetry Collections of 2010″ – is NOX the best book of…

December 16, 2010

E-readers report home

Yikes, kids! It’s even worse than this paranoid, conspiracy-theory believing lefty New York liberal thought! NPR reports that the e-reader’s ability to download a book for anywhere, also works the other way. It can report back to Amazon or Apple or whoever sold the e-book…

Journalist who threw shoe at Bush throws book at Iraqi prez

According to an Associated Press wire story, “The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush said Tuesday he is suing Iraq’s prime minister for his detention and alleged torture during the nine months he spent in custody.” At a signing…

Operation Dark Heart author sues to be uncensored

“A former Defense Intelligence Agency officer whose Afghan memoir was belatedly censored by the Pentagon filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to have the book’s full text restored in future printings,” according to a New York Times report by Scott Shane. The “belatedly censored” euphemism…

B.R. Myers on Good Literature and Bad Politics

Brian Reynolds Myers (or B.R. Myers) is one of those rare individuals who is a practicing expert in multiple fields. In the literary world, he is best known for his razor-edged attacks in The Atlantic on some of contemporary letters most celebrated figures. Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom:…

Book DMC

I was in Other Music the other night behind a dude of about my age who was buying The Secret Dub Life of the Flying Lizards, a group from my own time, about which the very tall, younger-by-about-twenty-years dude behind the counter was raving. I…

Day in Review

Apple iBookstore approved for Canada The Tournament of Books Long List is announced!!! Lovely meditation on the state of publishing at the end of 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction judges are announced New Award Watch – Publishing Innovation Awards -Independent Bookshop of the Year Benjamin…

December 15, 2010

Book deal for Financial Crisis commission report leads to heated battle between committee members

A book deal seems about to cause a major Congressional train wreck. According to a Bloomberg News wire story, “The internal split between Republicans and Democrats on the congressionally appointed commission investigating the 2008 financial crisis is about to break into the open.” According to…

Indies on the rise; Barnes and Noble to become gadget shop

Yesterday on NPR‘s Morning Edition, Barnes and Noble CEO Len Riggio may have made a bit of news (though we’ve been anticipating this for some time) when he told Lynn Neary the following: “We really don’t care if someone has an iPhone, because you can…

Why people like bad books

“Why do people like bad books?” asks Laura Miller in her newest Salon column, “Why We Love Bad Writing.” She poses the question in the wake of a “salvo against popular fiction launched in the pages of the Guardian newspaper this week by the British…

Chaucer vs. Shakespeare

Shelf Awareness takes delight in the new book All In A Word by linguist Vivian Cook (who reminds us that, in the U.K. Vivian is a man, while Vivien is a woman): Wordsmiths will rejoice, revel and wallow in this zesty compendium of all things etymological. Doctors’…

Expanding minds, one load at a time

Inculcating a love of reading in children is always an on-going effort for parents and educators, alike. The Pasedena Star-News reports on an amazingly original grass roots initiative to do just that: For about four years, a devoted group of women have been trekking to local laundromats…

Day in Review

SUPPORT RAIN TAXI They write great reviews Memoir by Stieg Larsson‘s “Companion” coming soon Wondering what literary prizes are “Major” and their dates Finally someone admits eBooks are good for publishers And more on the coming eBook revolution Indie bookstores might be the wave of the…

December 14, 2010

Poet Dean Young needs new heart and your help

GalleyCat called our attention to the fact that the poet Dean Young is in desperate need of a heart transplant and his friends and friends of poetry are asking for donations to help with his tremendous medical bills. From his webpage at The National Foundation…

Short stories find new home in Storyville

Back in November I wrote a post about Shortlist Press, a new short-story centered press in the UK using Apple’s 99-cent model for selling short stories electronically. This week the Storyville app launched using a slightly different but resonant strategy. Designed for mobile devices (so far…

Cookbooks are getting bigger

According to a Jane Black report in New York magazine, the average cookbook is getting heavier and heavier. Citing this blog post by culinary historian Anne Mendelson, the magazine notes that the increased weight of recent cookbooks “can actually be quantified”: The New York Times…

Pirate vs — well, Pirate

It seemed like a smart move, calling in prominent Norwegian children’s book author Anne B. Ragde to respond to claims made by a brash young book pirate in a leading Norwegian newspaper. According to Torrentfreak.com, which helpfully translates the report from Dagens Næringsliv in its…

Day in Review

Australians ponder the future of the publishing Politics and Prose may have found a buyer!!!! Forgotten Roald Dahl piece appears on eBay Vice‘s Fiction Issue 2010 is out New fiction by George Saunders. Be happy people How Roberto Bolano handled criticism The Man Asia Longlist…

December 13, 2010

Weekend in Review

Our love affair with Celebrity Memoir “The book has never looked more beautiful” Kitty Kelly on the post-Oprah fallout More advertising in e-books Finally a holiday book guide for the dignified drinker Sherlock Holmes is alive and well If you’re tired of reading about bookstores…

When it comes to Sarah Palin, familiarity breeds — well, lower sales

It’s number five on the New York Times bestseller list — but is Sarah Palin‘s second book, America by Heart a flop? Yes, says the Washington Post. According to a Post report by Paul Farhi, “Sarah Palin’s magic touch might be fading a bit. Although…

Is punk novelist Limonev Vladimir Putin's worst nightmare?

He was a New York punk in the 1970s, then an “incidiary” novelist … on his way to succeeding Vladimir Putin as leader of Russia? As Marc Bennetts explains of Eduard Limonov in an interview for the Observer: An avant-garde poet forced out of the…

Ads in e-books? Just say no

I’m not a luddite but I’m not totally platform indifferent either; I will choose a bound book over the e-other if forced to choose. Yet truth be told, I am excited about several prospects with respect to the future of reading. I’m not a fan of proprietary platforms…

Time for Kindle and iPad to worry about Android?

Okay, Google eBooks is finally here, and everyone’s talking about what it means for retailers who have joined up with Google to put themselves out of business sell ebooks. But what no one’s talking much about in public — but talking about little else in…