Booksquare

As promised, and after many delays, Kate Atkinson, the first choice of the LitBlog Co-Op’s quarterly “Read This” read for her book Case Histories, has taken the reins over at the Co-Op. Cleverly, she posted in the middle of the night, thinking nobody would notice. We will not tell her about RSS… In her first […]

Yesterday, we noted with interest that the Los Angeles Times hired a new book review editor. As these things often go, one person in our vicinity expressed (extremely) mild interest, which we took as encouragement to further the discussion. Said discussion quickly degenerated into a lively debate about men and white suits (a surprising number […]

We have a little secret: we have taken to picking and choosing literary journals to try based on editorial philosophy, believing that there is some sort of connection between editorial voice and journal voice (as opposed to just random voices in our head). As we have limited resources, we base our decisions on answers to […]

Reviews are funny things — or rather, the fact that they’re not funny is a funny thing. You have your dry recitation of the facts and figures of a book. You have your pretentious intellectual elite (our favorite!) analysis of homoerotic subtexts in Shane. You even have the biting, scathing, rip-roaring review. But it’s rare […]

Our dearest* Edward Wyatt (who went and got himself an excellent headline this time out) takes a look at a bad cover and how it was made right. We can only speculate about what was being smoked in the cover-decision meeting, but for the person who put Rick Moody and Conan the Barbarian together in […]

We will freely admit that we held no high hopes for the much-publicized Peter Pan sequel (though we did enjoy the cheerful cynicism that accompanied the decision). After all, why did we need a sequel? Isn’t it enough to let the story end. Yes, we’re still processing the finale of Six Feet Under, a series […]

What with it being August and all, it is hard to find interesting industry news. Especially since analysis of The Traveler has di–oops, not so fast. We have one more angle — oh sure, it’s been touched upon, but now the showdown between Elisabeth Kostova (The Historian) and John Twelve Hawks moves to center stage. […]

We were sitting with the sister, waiting for a haircut, when the conversation turned to the book we were reading. We described the plot and the underlying social issue — it was, ahem, an unabashed issue book all dressed up in literary credentials — and how the characters faced said issue. Granted, the sister is […]

While we are fundamentally opposed to doing stuff like research around here, sometimes research cannot be avoided — it comes knocking at the door, asking if we’d like to play. No, no, we say, knowledge only muddies opinions. Mostly research goes home; sometimes it parks on the front porch, holding its breath until we agree […]

It has turned out to be one of those weeks — the sun is shining (far too much), the traffic is flowing (far too slowly), and there’s not a enough caffeine in the world to raise our heart rate above sluggish (far too depressing). We knew we’d hit rock bottom when we actually caught our […]