Booksquare

Finally a Bill Clinton story we can get behind: piracy and the human spirit. In our former life, we were a bit of anti-piracy maven (not that we are opposed to pirates, per se, but we’ve never been big on stealing). We could discuss (for hours) the issues of selling fake DVDs and camcorders smuggled […]

An article from PW Newsline sparked all sorts of thoughts in our little brain. Maybe it’s because we do love to discuss contractual stuff (no really, we do; it’s like a fetish without encountering actual leather). Or maybe it’s because we cannot read anything without putting our own unique spin on the subject. Please stop […]

Censorship, which we assumed went out with the 90’s, has returned with a vengeance. Not only did the week have Linda Ronstadt getting thrown out of a Vegas casino for, ahem, expressing her political views, but Whoopi Goldberg lost her Slim-Fast gig for the same reason. We’re thinking this is a disturbing trend. Not to […]

We suspect it’s the fear of every memoirist — just after the story ends, things in real life get all interesting. Such seems to be the problem for Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Iranians who have read the book say it’s good, but not reflective of life as it is now. Yeah…well, […]

We have quite a collection of books about writing, thinking perhaps someday we might read them and learn something. Thus far, we have determined that they make excellent places to collect dust and cat fur. Not necessarily in that order. So it was to our delight that Cup of Chicha (where the beverage is always […]

David Thayer of Collected Miscellany discusses the writer at work — the solace he receives from knowing a major player works near his clothes closet, the frustration of word count (What? You only managed 497.5 words today? Slacker!), and fact that writing can never be truly represented on film. Though we do frequently crumple our […]

We are intrigued by the idea that Ms. Magazine is holding its first annual fiction contest. Other than the desire for fresh, original voices, the contest is pretty open (oops, there’s also a word count requirement). Postmark deadline for entries is August 1, 2004. Visit the Ms. site for details. Ms. Fiction Contest

We admit it: we once bought laundry detergent that promised to change our life. As so often happens, things remained exactly the same (until we bought the dishwasher that would change our life…and it, amazingly, did). As it turns out, readers are hungry for books that describe the world-altering moments, those precious days when our […]

We are back to our normal self after using technology to solve a time-consuming problem (actually, we’re not even using the technology — such was the conundrum that the husband took an interest and is now busily programming and whatnot while we sit around and accept accolades). We now possess sufficient free time to catch […]

As it turns out, our mental image of Geoffrey Chaucer was largely formed by Paul Bettany in A Knight’s Tale. Yeah, we’re the type who is perfectly comfortable picturing Chaucer naked. But, as they say, behind every good man is his scribe. Now we’re not sure Adam Pinkhurst would have ever considered himself anonymous — […]