Books/Mags/Blogs

For personal reasons, we do not encourage the use of puns. Except for really good ones. We like those. See headline below. Plus, it’s Awards Season, and we do like to keep tabs on our favorite honors. Like the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award. It should go without saying that someday we hope to be honored with a little plaque or trophy for our contribution to the oeuvre. Oh sure, we’re going to have to work hard — this is not a prize awarded to rank amateurs. But, excruciating as his entry is, Updike is up against some […]

We get the idea of a high-concept thriller. Mostly. For example, there is potential in a plotline like this one: But “third-party strategy,” as it’s known in the advertising world, has recently had its perils for PhRMA, the major lobbying group that represents drug manufacturers. The plan was to commission a fictional thriller to hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies. C’mon people — it’s Canada, which has to be, like, the least threatening country in the known universe. People like Canada and Canadians. If you’re going to scare people, don’t use Canada (or its pharmacies) as

It is either with pride or shame that we admit we are not a full-fledged geek. We’re thinking pride, but we also feel we should have read more Philip K. Dick. If only to say we’ve read Philip K. Dick. The books certainly sat on the coffee table long enough. Then again, if osmosis really does work as a learning process, surely we absorbed most of the texts during rare house-cleaning moments. Check the list to see where you fall on the geek scale. Top 20 Geek Novels – The Results

We have been informed that it is cheating* to use the same article for two different purposes on the same day. Normally, we would try to work our way around the issue by, well, posting this little piece tomorrow. Today, however, we have decided to live life to the fullest** and that includes writing about whatever we darn well want. We do so love hypocrisy, especially when the perpetrator stares his actions straight in the face and says, “Yeah, I did it.” It is the little things that make our world feel warm and safe. Thus we bring you what

The headline below says it all. We are going to hide under the covers for a while. Please send messages by carrier pigeon once the danger has passed. Britney Spears to Write a Kabbalah Children’s Book?

Pardon us if we’re thinking that the Google project is the most exciting thing to happen in the publishing industry since the printing press. Not since mass-production of books was made possible has there been such opportunity. We read an interesting piece this morning that addresses something we haven’t considered: fear of the unknowable. But in spite of this disorienting new fluidity, we still have print, we still have the book. And actually, Google Print in many ways affirms this since its search returns will point to print retailers and brick-and-mortar libraries. Yet the fact remains that the canon is

We begin Monday with the uncomfortable knowledge that it’s (and we surely do not know how this happened) October. Meaning we are now approximately ten months behind on several projects. The question before us now is whether it better to become an overachiever or set our personal all-time record for procrastination? Over at the Litblog Co-Op discussion about The Angel of Forgetfulness has taken a surprising twist. Author Steve Stern makes the rapid transition from author to blogger (this is a refreshing twist on an old standard). After reading the discussion between Dan Green and Derik Badman, Stern decided to

It took us a while to get to last week’s New York Times story about manga and the girls who read it, but we have a good excuse*. We have now read enough to feel confident in our ability to recap the highlights: publishers didn’t realize that girls’ market would be so big (despite the fact at women read more than men, and that the market is huge in Japan); there is a lot of different kinds of manga; many of the stories have mature and/or weird themes, and parents should exercise caution. How weird is it that this very