Hey! Holiday readers – we sell eBooks on our site. Dozens of titles are available for lightning fast download. Just check out our eBooks page. Most of the titles on our Holiday staff recommends are available as eBooks and there are some excellent bundles for…
The headline for the New York Times report on the death of Kim Jung-Il — “Kim Jong-il, North Korean Dictator, Dies Suddenly” — reminds me of two things. One is the professor of my Journalism 101 class in college correcting a similar heading of my…
Sometimes when you set out to design a new book, you get lucky and nail it on your first try. Other times, it takes a long process to reach a successful solution. It was a pleasure to work on Leigh Stein’s excellent debut novel The…
I’ll never forget the time in 2003 when I was sitting alone in an empty airport waiting room in Washington DC, waiting for an author to arrive, when my cell phone rang and an unnervingly warm, plummy, and immediately recognizable voice said, “Hullo, is that…
Word Up, the pop-up volunteer-run bookstore in Washington Heights, might be a more permanent fixture in the neighborhood if the shop’s creators are able to negotiate a new agreement with the landlord. Veronica Liu, an editor at Seven Stories Press, told DNA info that “This…
Rebecca Swift is the founder of Britain’s first and leading manuscript assessment service, The Literary Consultancy, established in 1996. She talked to MobyLives about the many different paths to publication and changes in publishing over the past 20 years. MOBY: The publishing landscape is very…
We don’t often report about newspapers adding new book columns — er, check that: we’ve never reported on a newspaper adding a new book column — but one of the country’s biggest papers, the New York Daily News, has added a new book blog, Page…
As Owen Jarus details in a report for MSNBC’s LiveScience, the poem was discovered in the West Virginia University library by visiting professor Elaine Treharne of Florida State University. Translating it from the Latin, she discovered it was written by Lady Elizabeth Dacre, a Catholic,…
Jane Austen was born on the 16th of December in 1775 in Hampshire, England, and quickly began a lifelong relationship with books, becoming a voracious reader and then, as we all know by now, a prolific writer of novels and Juvenilia. In our Art of…
Pirates of the Amazon Paris museum wins Bronte bidding war Dear Mr. Vonnegut What Slate doesn’t get about bookstores Top 10 author appearances on the Simpsons Bookforum on Debt Russian writers wait for a literary award Electric Literature wants your short short story Eclectic bookish…
There was an interesting story published a couple of days back in the the Sydney Morning Herald concerning a traveling art exhibit titled Handwritten. At the exhibit sheets from Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5 in C Minor” are displayed alongside a battlefield letter by Napoleon Bonaparte.…
STAFF PICKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS It was one of the best years ever in the history of Melville House, with perhaps the widest variety of titles we’ve ever done. So we asked our staff to help you winnow through them by telling us…
George Whitman, the American who owned one of the world’s most well-known — and beloved — bookstores, Shakespeare & Company, famously located on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral, died yesterday from the after-effects of a…
John Waters, in this interview at The Financial Times, claims to be regretful about how gay culture has gone mainstream: I miss it … I’m for gay marriage. I don’t want to do it, but I certainly think people should be allowed to, and I wouldn’t vote for anybody…
Razan Ghazzawi, a 31-year-old Syrian blogger, was arrested and charged with “trying to incite sectarian strife” earlier this week, which could result in a 15-year prison sentence for the U.S.-born writer. The irony is that she was arrested en route to Jordan in order to…
“Don’t let the strains of ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ over the store’s audio system fool you. Barnes & Noble is ‘against’ Christmas” — or at least, so says conservative Christian group the American Family Association, reports Shandra Martinez in a Washington Post story.…
Entertainment Weekly turned us on to the totally weird literary crafts of Debbie Ritter of Champaign, Illinois. Her Etsy page shows off her handmade wares: dozens of “miniature art dolls” including many famous authors. Thirty-four dollars gets you a tiny Herman Melville ”wearing a black wool suit with…
John Updike’s boyhood home for sale on eBay Naguib Mahfouz archive sale rouses anger The phenomenal ‘New York Review of Books’ NPR: 10 best novels of 2011 The most beautiful books of 2011 The most beautiful college libraries in the world The year in books…
Poet John Kinsella published a rousing manifesto of poetry as activism in the New Statesman yesterday. He recently pulled out of the T.S. Eliot prize, days after Alice Oswald also renounced her nomination. Both were protesting the sponsorship of the Poetry Book Society, which supports the prize,…
“The Google Book Settlement may be dead, but the litigation lives on,” observes a Publishers Weekly report by Andrew Albanese. Or, as a Wall Street Journal report by Terin Miller explains, “The Authors Guild filed a motion in U.S. District Court here seeking class certification…
Not much, as it turns out. According to a New York magazine feature by Rachel Friedman, The New Yorker pays just $460 for a 36-line poem. Does anyone pay more? Not according a survey of handful of prestigious journals. The current going rates, according to…
Recently, Emily Temple at Flavorwire ran her choices for the “most criminally overlooked books” this year. We don’t want to arrest anyone here at Melville House, although I would like to present my own list of titles that I think are deserving of your cold,…
How much $ do poets make? Bloomsbury UK + Google What became of illustrations in fiction? Nancy Pearl’s 2011 Picks October bookstore sales fell 6.6% Greek Bookseller Fights on Despite Austerity Putting the “book” in Facebook Booksellers cry foul at VAT hike Bill Clinton and…
Illustration by Rumors Not to flog a dead horse, but Amazon’s “Price Check Saturday” promotion (see our earlier report) seems to have fanned some lasting opposition, ranging from the sublime to the extreme. The sublime may be something we saw called out on Shelf Awareness…
Amazon’s declaration of war on brick & mortar stores has lead to many powerful and creative responses from retailers. None though, so cleverly efficient as this chart (DOWNLOAD THE PDF), which is easily my favorite response to date. This amazing distilation of Amazon’s world view…
Tom Meyer recited the entire Book of Revelations (one hour, from memory) to the thirty people assembled at the Imperial Community Church in El Centro, California, on Sunday night. “Meyer, 35, performs the unique skill as a profession through Wordsower Ministries which helps support orphanages…
Ever eager to jump on board with a no-brainer of a free idea, public idiot and Mayor of London Boris Johnson has announced his support for book-sharing schemes to be launched on the city’s tube network in time for the 2012 Pointless, Expensive Disaster Olympic…
The moment we’ve all been waiting for… The 9/11 novel The New York Times called “irritating” and New York Press hailed as “incredibly false” has been made into a major feature film starring Tom Hanks, Sandra Bollock, and some precocious kid. That’s right, Extremely Loud and…
Naguib Mahfouz: A centenary tribute Make a book Christmas tree HuffPo book club PUBSLUSH Where are we in digital publishing On Spanish-language book publishing Book swaps at London tube stations Amazon’s bestselling books of 2011 Penguin joins push for short ebooks OWS library hopes to…
Amazon‘s “Price Check Saturday” had already stirred up the world of outrage going into the weekend, as we reported in a one MobyLives story after another. Friday the American Booksellers Association joined the fray with a blistering letter from ABA head Oren Teicher, saying, in…
