Booksquare

Beatrice unknowingly taps into our unofficial Band of the Week while examining one of our favorite subjects: Wal-Mart and books. Yes, we know, it’s hard to believe, but they’re doing it again, this time with the new George Carlin book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140130134/alttags-20). According to their representative*: “We did not order this book,” says Karen Burk, a […]

Torstar, parent to Harlequin Books (no, we don’t have time to look up the corporate structure, we may not have proper corporate names), has reported another drop in earnings. This is a scary trend. The article is unclear, but seems to suggest that the company’s net sales were in line with other publishers (either that […]

One of our secret vices in life is lists. We adore logical groupings of information. Give us a countdown and we get very excited. We have done things we don’t want to admit to in attempts to find out what is at Number One. Just as the Top Forty is a bit of a myth […]

If you have to ask a question about something being too obscure, the answer is “yes.” By all accounts, the finalist list for this year’s National Book Awards defines obscure. However, in all fairness, the awards aren’t that well known themselves. We did a little reporting — biased, because that’s how we like it. We […]

We know…you’re wondering how we’re going to turn a story on pale yellow ink in a cookbook into a cautionary tale for writers. We admit, the task seems daunting at first. After all, it isn’t the author who makes such decisions. That’s what art departments and whatnot are for. One would think authors are off […]

First, we suggest you sit down because we are going to shock you. A major United States newspaper has managed to publish an entire article about romance novels without mentioning the B-phrase. In fact, if we had stuck with just the Yahoo! feed, we would have awarded the article our extremely rare Responsible Journalism plaque. […]

We thought, what the heck, this John Sayles interview is short, we’re playing with a few short stories…besides, it’s not like we’re eager to hit the freeway for another day of meetings. If we’d followed the advice of Ryoko (the cat who informs us when we’re not living up to her expectations — she talks […]

We’re going to be honest — we are so glad we don’t live in a swing state. We recommend those that do invest in TiVos and employ them early and often. The next week will be one constant commercial. Makes us wonder what will happen to the advertising economy on November 3…yes, the things we […]

If you had to make the choice, would it be books or food? Man, we’d love to say books, but to go without Chinese noodles? That’s a rough one. However, as evidenced by our garage (the repository of all that won’t fit in the house) and our office (the place where we lied to bring […]

Back in the day, when this Worldwide Web thing was so new you could mention it to your friends and get blank stares (huh? why would you want to do that?), we would spend Friday evenings, uh, chatting with likemineded geeks located in San Francisco and Oakland (this was, oddly, the only time they ever […]