Books/Mags/Blogs

We cannot be any more plain: the fashion of taking historical figures and making them into gumshoes must end. It was cute and clever for about five minutes. Now it’s an eye roller. And not in a happy, good way. We cannot believe Aristotle dusting for fingerprints. We are skeptical that Elvis Presley possessed the requisite attention span. And, please, tell us Beatrix Potter is not out crime-solving with the help of Peter Rabbit. We beg you — promise us it isn’t so. We are willing to grant, on occasion, that an author might be interested in spinning a story […]

We went into this article on the woefully misnamed dick lit (woefully misnamed because, well, we expect it to be about private detectives; plus, we were rooting for lad lit simply because no male we know will pick up a book marketed as such) fairly certain it would be yet another been there, done that story. You know. Where men write books in an attempt to emulate the wild success of books written by women. Because, as Russell Smith helpfully notes, it’s all about fitting Tab A into Slot B — though, as we all know, high jinks will ensue

We can specifically remember the day we “got” short stories. It was high school, possibly our sophomore year. Now, this shouldn’t be a surprise — what else were we supposed to learn that year (sophomore year being the time of biology and a rather frustrating experience with something called geometry). Alas, we didn’t learn our appreciation in school — we found happiness the old-fashioned way: when we stole a book of W. Somerset Maugham’s short stories from our mother’s personal library. As she, unfathomably, never rereads anything, the loss has gone unremarked until this confession. A year ago, we attempted

We usually don’t scratch our heads over articles from the Online Journalism Review, but, well, there’s a first time for everything. The usually tech-savvy Marc Glaser takes a look at “astroturfing” — where letters to the editor are professionally produced and mass mailed to publications. Okay, we admit it; we’re being unfair. Glaser has written on this topic before — he’s just looking at it from another angle. We can get behind that. We like that Glaser points out that more editors should be using technology (that computer on their desks) to do research, rather than the traditional phone call.

We once heard an editor say that the publishing industry moves deliberately toward trends. Maybe it’s because it takes a while to write a book, we don’t know, but suddenly you can’t turn around without running into books on sex. We’re sorry — we weren’t clear. There have always been books about sexual activity; now they’re mainstream. It’s like publishing has finally figured out that all those people who rent dirty movies can read. Clearly they have disposable income they’re willing to spend. “I don’t publish pornography,” said Judith Regan, president and publisher of ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins. “I

We won’t be too snarky about CNN’s chicklit story — after all, it does explore what we think is the coming of age of the genre. You know, where publishers realize there’s more to female lives than shopping and gossiping with a gender-balanced (three straight female, one gay male) group of friends. Not that we object to shopping, especially for shoes. Clothes, we can give or take — we have a hate-hate relationship with dressing room mirrors. So we are going to respectfully disagree with Margaret Marbury of Red Dress Ink: “Readers want a female-looking book on the outside. They

The Christian Science Monitor’s profile of The Paris Review’s new editor Brigid Hughes wasn’t particularly revelatory (possibly because we’re the type who wonder how anyone under the age of 30 has enough drive to be successful. Haven’t they been reading the press? 40 is the new 30 — it’s okay to slack off for another ten years). Then at the end, what we thought should have been the lead is revealed: One way Hughes hopes to attract a new audience is through what she calls the DNA of literature project. To be launched in September, and supported by a grant

As it turns out, summer is here (and, based on the non-stop military jet activity that awakened us, so is the President of the United States*), and we haven’t gotten around to publishing the Booksquare Summer Reading List. We wish we weren’t so late, but things happen. Actually, looking back, nothing’s happened, but we don’t have a better excuse. So, in no particular order:

Over lunch yesterday, we had an interesting discussion about ebooks (and received another view on the Random House ebook royalty changes — not sure it moved our mind, but it was an interesting take). Mostly we talked about how the market is growing — this lead to a comparison with videos in the late seventies, early eighties. So we were interested in Wired’s story on the subject…until we got to the lead. Did anyone else know that Irish Emigrant is the longest running newsletter on the Internet? How absolutely cool is that? What fascinates us about the article is not

Beginning authors often worry that someone with steal their ideas. This worry is usually supplanted by the realization that there are far too many of them out there, and it might be nice if someone took a few off a person’s mind. The truth is that two people, when faced with the exact same idea, will take it in different directions. This is why eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable. People create their own reality. Thus it was inevitable that a book (a chain novel) written by 19 authors would have a few problems: But like almost any collective effort, the