The CanalLee Rourke
Every Man Dies AloneHans Fallada
Days after its feel-good announcement that it had secured the necessary financing from GE Capital to avoid insolvency (except, as MobyLIves reported, it actually hadn’t), the Borders Group announced last night that it will nonetheless be “delaying” January payments to “vendors, landlords and others.” One of…
President Obama‘s speech at the Tucson memorial service commemorating those who died in the shooting rampage that hospitalized Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is now available as an e-book. According to the New York Times report: St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, has converted the speech into…
Show of hands: What was the last government report you read that wasn’t The 9/11 Commission Report? Anyone check out the latest page-turner by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on payday lending? Let’s improve the odds a bit and include classics of the genre. After…
Once again we return with “The A to Z of Spurious,” our micro-encyclopedia of intellectual and not-so-intellectual topics discussed by Lars and W., the two endlessly chattering “heroes” of Lars Iyer’s novel Spurious. (Read all the installments of the series here.) The book is not,…
The changing world of the book critic This is quite the 2011 lit. preview To “Like” or not to like a book O’Brien & Wolff on writing about Vietnam If a good book doesn’t sell… blame the cover Government report moves units For self publisher…
In a surprise announcement made after everyone went home last night, the Borders Group says it has had a life preserver thrown to it by the money-lending arm of GE, which has agreed to give the company $550 million. Reading between the lines of the…
In case you still haven’t heard, Mark Salter is the author of O: A Presidential Novel. Last week Page Six floated the Salter theory when someone–who apparently wished to remain anonymous themselves–told them it was Salter. Then yesterday Time‘s Mark Halperin connected all the dots…
Taking a cue from UNESCO’s World Book Day, a group of distinguished editors, booksellers and agents in the UK have launched World Book Night, which, according to their website “represents the most ambitious and far-reaching celebration of adult books and reading ever attempted in the…
“Two friends [Lars and W.] drink, walk in the English countryside, and talk (and talk and talk) in Iyer’s playfully cerebral debut,” says Publishers Weekly about Lars Iyer‘s Spurious, which it also describes as “piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.” But what do they talk and…
Bookslut points us to the blog of the European Journal of International Law, where New York University law professor Professor Joseph Weiler writes a column detailing what it’s like to find himself in the dock of a Paris courtroom, where he is currently appearing on…
The Towering Irrelevance lists the 25 terms Herman Melville uses to describe beards in only two chapters of White Jacket or The World on a Man-of-War (via Flavorwire). Here they be: suburbs of the chin homeward-bounders fly-brushes long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of…
A book designer is responsible for every aspect of the way a book looks and feels, from the jacket art and title page down to the page numbers and line spacing. Even the edges of the book have to be considered—you’ve probably encountered a book…
We’re not officially accepting submissions yet for the Moby Awards (more info on that soon) but damn, this book trailer for The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell has got to be in the running for something (via HTML Giant). Enjoy.
Ian McEwan’s wonderful response to his critics Introducing TED books NYTimes to publish book on WikiLeaks And Orphan Pamuk rightly criticizes the westernization of literature How does the NBCC pick it’s finalists? Poet Jo Shapcott wins the Costa Prize Amazon the publisher – Kindle Singles…
In Britain, library patrons are not taking threatened closures to some 450 libraries in stride: they’ve announced that the 5th of February will be a nationwide day of action that will include protests and over forty “read-ins” featuring major writers such as Philip Pullman, Alan…
The casual reader rarely realizes the amount and variety of work that goes into finding, editing, producing, promoting, and distributing the books they pick up in the bookstore, bring home, and learn to love. So today we’re going to tip our hat to two of the people…
I missed it when it originally appeared in the Guardian recently but, thankfully, as I was catching up on my Casual Optimist today, I caught this rather excellent comic strip by Tom Gauld that sums up the situation pretty well for the soon-to-be orphan books…
In her most recent column for Salon, MobyLives heroine hero Laura Miller, never one to shy from calling a spade a spade, zeroes in on some serious and sexist misreading by Sebastian Faulks of Charlotte Bronte‘s classic, Jane Eyre. As Miller details the background,the great…
It seems that Sherlock Holmes is once again set to beat death and, one can assume, any mysteries he may encounter. The first time Holmes presumably entered the after life was in the 1893 tale “The Final Problem” in which author Arthur Conan Doyle had…
Nabakov – badass lepidopterist Let the great read in begin Interesting history of modern publishing More confirmation Amazon is dominating the ebook market Derek Walcott wins TS Eliot prize 59 Things you didn’t know about Virgina Woolf Fun new toy of the day – Google…
Last week, the Pentagon‘s top lawyer told a packed auditorium that Dr. Martin Luther King, if alive today, would support American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: “I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world,…
Not long ago when Governor Rick Perry was doing the publicity rounds for his book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, he was bragging to everyone who would listen about how much he hated the bailouts and the stimulus law. He even held…
Lars Iyer, the author of our new novel Spurious, recently sent us a handy reader’s guide to his book. As way of introduction, he wrote: I hope Spurious can be enjoyed by a reader entirely unfamiliar with the names and ideas mentioned in its pages.…
According to a report that ran last week in Le Figaro, Regis Debray (author of the Melville House title A Modest Proposal: A Plan For the Golden Age) has been elected to the Academy Goncourt — the organization that, every fall, awards France’s most popular…
Great interview with a brilliant young book designer Author gets publicity by urinating on Borges’ grave We’ve read this story before Put some bacon in your book Nora Roberts foundation donates $13,000 to high school GalleyCat makes very cool “mix tape” of NBCC finalists Authors…
In an attempt to persuade Amazon.com to build a distribution center there that would employ 1,400 people, the state of Tennessee “offered a package of economic incentives that included free land, job-training assistance and more than $12 million in property-tax breaks.” But it wasn’t enough,…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Tournament of Books–the March-Madness, bracket-style literary competition held by The Morning News– is the best literary prize in existence. Forget the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Not-the-Booker, the NBCC, the NBA, Orange, Dublin, Rome, PEN/Faulkner, etc.…
Stop! Everything you thought you knew about typesetting and good graphic design was wrong. All wrong… Back in 2010 the BBC ran a piece titled, ‘What’s so wrong with Comic Sans?’ as an exploration into why the font has fostered so much hatred among not only…
In a rather provocative and fresh article titled “It’s time to stop this obsession with works of art based on real events” in the Guardian yesterday, William Skidelsky argues, well, what the article’s headline says. Using films such as The King’s Speech and The Social…