Books/Mags/Blogs

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 refocusing her energy on the living. We suspect this is due to America’s change in priorities since Hurricane Katrina. As always, Oprah’s logic is pragmatic: “I wanted to open the door and broaden the field,” Ms. Winfrey said in an interview. “That allows me the […]

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 Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil). There will be, of course, the usual tug-of-war over who gets the book first* before we get into the real question of the day: is George Saunders the most popular unknown author in the United States today? While we

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 unveiled throughout the week, lots of great discussion about this quarter’s title is scheduled, and other fun* group activities** are on the horizon. * – Far be it for us to suggest that someone was cracking the whip, but, well, Tingle Alley threatened the rest

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, and sides — it is the only Thomas Pynchon title we have tossed aside in defeat. Maybe it was the bananas, maybe it was the rockets, maybe we just didn’t get it. But there’s hope. Minor hope, sure, but anything to make those little games

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 seeking subtlety and depth. Please understand that we’re not being flippant when we say that blowing up stuff is easy — it’s getting to the point where you’re willing to do so that is hard. We’ve thought a lot about this idea since we first

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 well, but she popped out of the woodwork for a moment. Hinton doesn’t have a new book nor, technically, anything else new, but there’s this little rerelease of the film The Outsiders. Even a reclusive author cannot stand firm against a marketing juggernaut. Overall, the

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 publisher to take advantage of podcast technology as a marketing tool. You can hear fine authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Frost, and H.G. Wells reading from their upcoming novels. There is a menu of weekly selections and a featured title (also known as the

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 last week, he enraged some of France’s most eminent literary critics by witholding copies from them to stave off bad reviews. Now they appear to have struck back by circulating an embarrassing rap album featuring the tuneless voice of the controversial author in an apparent

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 ever went away — he’s had a storied movie career and does quite well in the soundtrack department. But that’s not the same as a novel. Then again, one could suggest that the success of a character is a whole function of the author. Change

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 pause that can only be caused by an intellectual lament of dubiously obscure value: Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel, “Shalimar the Clown” (Random House; $25.95), call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls? Max Ophuls is a highly distinctive name,