Square Pegs

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 was an extraordinary event. Generally, literary embargoes are not especially polarizing issues. They are designed to create a false sense of importance around a book — by pretending that the contents are so completely mind-blowing that the consumer must purchase the book in order to […]

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 traditionally published and the electronically published. In creating a tortured criteria of “Subsidy” or “Vanity”, RWA misses the mark. And for a nearly a decade now, these battles have seemed to be more about protecting an old-school model of publishing rather than embracing changes in

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 might be, the response wasn’t so much starry-eyed as dollar sign-eyed. Though I am clearly not one to give fiscal advice, I can say this: stop the madness! While it seems like a coup to score the memoirs of the moment — these are not

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 leads to the book on the top of our list: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. Normally, we do not fall for marketing ploys (a certain pink phone excepted) or gimmicks (ditto for the DSW shoe coupons), but we were suckered into this one before we

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, despite her parents’ vehement arguments to the contrary, believes that reading outside is playing. Rather than looking for inauspicious news, why not build upon the auspicious trends? True bookworms are rare. If you are unfortunate enough to live with one, we’re sorry. All we can

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 know due to our ten million dollar underestimation of Spiderman 3’s opening weekend domestic box office gross — but the reality is always far more fascinating than the surface. This is going to get worse before it gets better. We strongly encourage you to read

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 Novelists” issue, available right now. Maybe the definition of “Best of Young American Novelists” is naturally a limiting descriptor. In this second installment, the authors are younger (presumably to fit the dictates of the issue’s title) and more ethnically diverse (America being a melting pot

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 the Amazon Prime service remains a huge boon to the fine folks at BS HQ). Amazon even had a thing called a “Plog”, which was some kind of personalized blog. What Amazon doesn’t do well is invite the kind of community that characterizes other Web

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 spent the past decade or so focusing on the reader experience. There we said it. We feel no sadness for Borders, except as it relates to our personal book shopping issues. It is, as you will all recall, 2007. For those who haven’t been paying

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 indicator literary brilliance. Novelist Muriel Gray has leveled this accusation at this year’s Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction finalists. They are, to quote, “…too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.” For those who don’t enjoy the task of reading between the lines, this