Booksquare

While a goodly number of world spent the weekend reading the final installment in the Harry Potter series (do you want to be caught uninformed the next you venture out in public?), others spent the weekend debating…embargoes. Not the political kind, the literary kind. Unlike traditional book embargoes, the release of the final Harry Potter […]

Since the moment that epublishing was a pipe dream for authors, writer organizations have had an uncomfortable relationship with the medium. No organization, however, has been so publicly awkward in the epub dance than the Romance Writers of America. For nearly a decade now, the RWA has been engaged in a weird battle between the […]

Word on the street is that Donald Rumsfeld is shopping his memoirs. If I recall correctly, it sounded like he was paying courtesy calls to the major publishing houses. “Hi, pleased to meet you. I’ll be expecting you to offer me a lot of money soon.” And it doesn’t matter what a publisher’s political bent […]

So it’s the start of the Memorial Day holiday and we’re thinking ahead to three days of sloth (except for the shopping for the barbecue, then the actual cooking, oh, and, apparently we’re going to “clean”), and we’re thinking about summer reading. Summer reading is like winter reading except it frequently involves the hammock. Which […]

It is our belief that bookworms are born, not made. You know who we mean. The kid who sneaks in a paragraph when Mom’s back is turned. The child who devises an elaborate under-the-covers flashlight system because when it comes to sleep versus finishing a chapter, well, sleep isn’t all that important. The one who, […]

One of the things lurking on the edges of our memory is the state of foreign levy payments to talent in Hollywood. The LA Weekly brought that memory back, loud and fast. On the surface, this seems like a case of an unpaid $20 million — a mere pittance by Hollywood standards, as we well […]

There is no doubt that judging literary merit takes on an eye of the beholder quality. One judge’s treasure is another’s muddled mess. Art, by nature, is subjective. Selecting the best of something often comes down to judgment calls and aesthetic choices that seem to defy reason. Thus we consider Granta’s “Best of Young American […]

If you’ve been paying attention for the past year or so, you’ve noticed that Amazon.com has embraced Web 2.0 technology with something approaching religious fervor. You name the buzzword, they’ve implemented the technology. Wiki (now known as the, uh, Amapedia), Ajax, blogging, tagging (and tag clouding), free shipping (okay, not a Web 2.0 technology, but […]

We know that times are tough. In an era where your basic blogger can barely find the time to shop for new shoes (much less purses!*), sympathy must be expended to others in the industry. Even empathy, though that is harder for us to muster. Especially when it comes to the Borders chain. Borders hasn’t […]

Nothing boils our blood faster than the suggestion that today’s women authors lack imagination. Okay, maybe the suggestion that women writers simply cannot write as well as men authors, but we’ve ranted enough on that topic for this decade. Thus we’ll take the former topic for $500. Presence in the classroom is not necessarily an […]