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Barnes & Noble will shutter Fictionwise.com and its affiliated e-book sites on December 4; thieves took a portable writing desk used by Middlemarch author George Eliot from the Nuneaton Museum in England; Dwell created a map of independent bookstores across America; and other news.
Penguin and Random House have reached an agreement to combine—creating the largest book publisher in the world; Flavorpill has an essential stormy weather reading list; Publishers Weekly lists terrible reviews of classic literature; and other news.
Melville House wonders when publishers will speak out about Amazon; New York City's Algonquin Hotel announced that when it reopens this spring after a renovation, the famed Oak Room will be gone; E. B. White answers a charge levied by the ASPCA; and more
Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, as well as Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, passed away yesterday in their respective countries; novelist Paul Auster has engaged in a war of words with Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey; Open Letters Monthly examines the hidden life of Virginia Woolf's institutionalized half-sister, Laura Makepeace Stephen; and other news.
Two of the country’s most prominent newspapers announced significant changes to their book coverage last week. The Chicago Tribune not only reformatted its Saturday books page but officially launched Printers Row, a literary blog featuring expanded content and contributions from readers. The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, scrapped its usual best-seller list on Sunday in favor of lists provided by the Northern California Independent Bookseller Association.
Critic Geeta Sharma-Jensen penned her final column as books editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Saturday after announcing last week that she has accepted a voluntary buyout offer from the newspaper’s publisher. Similar deals—part of a cost-cutting plan to address flagging ad revenue—have been accepted by thirty-six other employees at the paper, including four arts and entertainment writers.
Joshua Bodwell explores the fiction behind this “writer’s writer” whose characters are as deep and complex as the man who created them.
Let me be the last—the absolute dead last—to point out that we're in the midst of a memoir craze. My favorite form of procrastination used to be computer solitaire, but now I prefer to chat on the phone with my writing friends and discuss the ongoing boom in autobiographical literature. We speculate like housing developers prognosticating on the real estate market. Will the bubble pop? Will prices continue to rise? Will market trends ever again veer toward literary fiction?
