Yesterday, Edan Lepucki in The Millions wrote a great piece on the perils of self-publishing and the benefits of working with a small publishing house. She also noted that “the conversation about self-publishing too often ignores the role of independent publishing houses in this shifting…
It’s hard to have a public conversation about books these days without somebody jumping up to pump their fists, go woo woo, and decree that ebooks are going to kick print books’ collective ass into eternity. This is often followed up by some accusatory snarling…
The Big Think recently published this great list of untranslatable words related to relationships. Our favourites: Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time. Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first…
“The Fallback Plan” is a weekly column at TheFasterTimes.com written by Leigh Stein, author of the forthcoming novel The Fallback Plan. It offers illustrated advice on any number of life’s questions. For an illustrated fallback plan of your own, write to Leighstein@thefastertimes.com. If you write to Leigh and…
Fahrenheit 451 is an e-book Hottest books at the Seattle Public Library In praise of book critics Publishers curb library eBook access Pride and Prejudice Sequel 20% of retail purchases made via tablet Indie bookstores in the Amazon age Godin ends the Domino Project UK…
Spain’s El País newspaper has pronounced a state of crisis in worldwide literary criticism. In an article on Saturday, Winston Manrique Sabogal interviewed some of the foremost names in literary journalism, including literary editor of The Guardian Claire Armitstead; essayist, editor and translator Eliot Weinberger; and…
Noted American poet Ruth Stone is dead at 96. Stone, born on June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia, died Nov. 19 of natural causes at her home in Ripton, Vt, according to her daughter, Phoebe Stone, as reported in the New York Times obituary. Stone…
Two weeks ago, André Schiffrin, founder of The New Press, the former publisher of Pantheon Books, and the author of our A Political Eduction, was awarded the Chevalier in the Order of the Legion of Honor of France. Below is the award address given by…
POTUS and family was recently spotted at Kramerbooks in Washington’s Dupont Circle doing some early holiday shopping near his office. The Washington Post even has a video of the photo op, which took place this past Saturday. (See the video below, in case you’d like…
Pippa Middleton gets £400K Tony Kushner gets 100K How much does a $.99 eBook cost Amazon Hachette teams with Bloomberg Business Week for eBooks 10 lost novels the world found again Borders in WARN Act deal Smartphone adoption nears 30% LiveWriters 50 most entertaining book…
When New York City cops shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment at the city’s Zuccotti Park two weeks ago (in the middle of the night, natch), they confiscated some 5,000 books and other articles from the People’s Library that was serving protesters there. Footage…
In a story for the New York Review of Books, investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein (The Hollywood Economist) provides a detailed chronological account of the events that took place at the Sofitel New York hotel on May 14th, 2011 that led to Dominique Strauss-Kahn being indicted (briefly) for attempted…
If you’re not from Ohio or western Pennsylvania then chances are you’ve never heard of Ashtabula. Other than a passing mention in Jack Kerouac’s The Road and Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When Your Gone” Ashtabula has had little to no chance to…
“There’s something about red books,” writes Donna Liquori in a Times-Union essay, “For the holidays, a pile of old red books really complements an evergreen bough on a table or mantle … Red represents love, blood, caution and anger. It’s a color that stimulates us just…
Emily Cleaver worked at Quinto Bookshop in London for four years, and wrote to us with a link to her website, Small Plays About My Day. In it, she details some interactions with customers that are humorous, bizarre, and disconcerting, and give our first weird…
Kerouac’s ‘lost’ debut novel Top 10 novels of the 2000′s Future of the book in Sci-Fi Top 10 Indie books of 2011 Tom McCarthy: My desktop David L. Ulin interviews Joan Didion The 27th letter The pen is mightier than the sword More clues to…
It’s an unusual forum for talking about what happened at UC Davis last Friday, but the Amazon product page for “Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray” has attracted some amazingly clever and biting reviews. As the incident—UC Davis police…
In the face of overwhelming evidence, novelist Lenore Hart has vociferously denied charges that she plagiarized large parts of her historical novel about Edgar Allan Poe‘s wife, The Raven’s Bride — in an argument with her accusers on her Facebook page. As MobyLives noted a…
Brick-and-mortar booksellers have always had one major advantage over online stores: the expertise and interaction their staff can add to the book-buying experience. Plenty of online stores have tried, with varying degrees of success, to find ways to replicate this on their sites. In its…
Since we’ll be out of the office tomorrow engaging in gluttonous activities, we thought it best to note before we leave that one of our authors, Ameen Rihani, was born on November 24th. Rihani’s place of birth was a small town in Lebanon, and he…
#LiteraryTurducken The History of the English Language Bad Sex in Fiction Award Martha Grimes is 2012 MWA Grand Master Just the Right Book Reader’s Circle Steinbeck’s bitter fruit It’s a great time to be a reader Occupy Libraries around the world The scarcity of ‘original…
In the wake of the furor that erupted earlier this month when Amazon announced that Amazon Prime members could “borrow” ebooks from its Kindle Lending Library — causing numerous authors and publishers to declare that they hadn’t been consulted about this and it was a…
In the wake of the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we asked Lewis Lapham, the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly and the former editor of Harper’s, what books he would recommend in order to better understand the current political climate. Lapham wrote in an…
This is a friendly MobyLives service announcement: Black Friday is looming and major online retailers have already aggressively begun promotions in order to gobble-up business from traditional brick & mortars. Big top retail stores will promise deep discounts on product and open for business at…
Helen Abdouch, 84, of Omaha, Nebraska is suing Hadley, Massachusetts bookseller Ken Lopez for selling an autographed copy of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road that was inscribed to her, according to this report in the Washington Post. Abdouch was the executive secretary for John…
Fuck yeah, it’s OK to swear. That’s the message being sent out by the British courts, which have ruled in favour of a man who ‘repeatedly used an expletive while being searched by the police.’ The judge, we’re told, ‘ruled that officers heard the term…
The literary hipsters handbook European book market and eBooks Bartleby’s to re-open Nothing but a Movie Illiterate at 96 published author at 98 Hungry Hobbit Cafe sued by Tolkien estate Michelle Obama starts student poet program Count the indies: NYTBR names its top 100 Parents…
Police violence against Occupy Wall Street protesters reached a new level late last week when campus police at the University of California, Berkeley truncheoned 70-year-old poet Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the United States, and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman. It started, Hass…
In his new novel, 11/22/63, Stephen King “employs a time traveler to interview Lee Harvey Oswald’s mysterious associate George De Mohrenschildt since he died of shotgun blast to his head on March 29, 1977,” writes investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, but “a time-traveling avatar is…
Amazon’s Kindle Fire seems poised to make a big splash this holiday season, with early trajectories pointing to a staggering number of tablets sold by the end of the year. Analysts have close to doubled their early predictions based on the internet retailer’s initial sales.…
