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For the eight or nine of you who slept through last week, we have breaking news. For the zillion who were paying attention, we are going to revisit an old story. Either way, books have been saved, or something like that. Oprah Winfrey has decided she’s done enough boosting sales for dead people and is […]

The husband adds new fiction to his reading repertoire rarely. Life is too short to turn down the pleasures of yet another lengthy work on recursive scripts. However, when a new author joins the husband’s team, he’s a member for life. Thus, we are bit excited about the new George Saunders book around here (The […]

After a month of “Not tonight, honey, we’re reading”, members of the LitBlog Co-Op have chosen the Fall 2005 “Read This!” title. Pop on over to the main LitBlog site to see who earned our collective love — this quarter’s title is guaranteed to invite lively discussion. But wait, there’s more! Other nominees will be […]

It is rare that the husband is able to lord his reading prowess over us, but it happened once (and he, being the type who recalls the 1972 World Series as if it were yesterday, relishes the memory a little too often). We’re sorry, but we have attempted Gravity’s Rainbow from the front, back, middle, […]

In the past weeks, an editor and an agent have suggested that they’re not looking for the terrorist novel, the classic “someone goes into a crowd and blows stuff up” sort of thing. While some took an expanded view of this idea, we, perversely, took it quite literally. We presumed that these publishing professionals were […]

Something about the statement that S.E. Hinton is rarely interviewed sent us to our trusty friend, Google. And sure enough, when her novel Hawkes Harbor was released last year, there were interviews. It’s always a relief to know that the brain still functions, at least on one cylinder. Okay, maybe the novel didn’t do so […]

Today, Holtzbrinck, the corporate parent of fine publishers like Audio Renaissance, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, St. Martin’s Press, and Tor/Forge, left the competition in the dust. What’s that, you say, how could this be? What happened when I wasn’t paying attention? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re kidding you. Sure, Holtzbrinck is the first […]

We’ve never pretended to understand the dark underbelly of literary criticism, so maybe the notion of releasing embarrassing rap records as retaliation for withholding review copies is a normal thing. We try to run with a less vicious crowd. When the celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq launched his latest novel in circumstances of extraordinary secrecy […]

It can be argued that death shouldn’t be an impediment, yet for so many of us, drawing that last breath heralds the end of our creativity. But should our greatest achievements suffer for our mortality. No, says Ian Fleming Publications, that’s just wrong. Long live Bond and all that. Oh sure, it’s not like 007 […]

Here is a real-life problem: say you are cruising through your morning reading, coffee at the exact right temperature. Suddenly, you encounter a lead sentence that gives you pause. Not the good, thoughtful kind of pause. The kind of pause that makes you swallow said exactly right temperatured coffee the wrong way. The kind of […]