Books
By Benjamin Phelan | January 18, 2011 | 9:07 pm
Midway through Dave Itzkoff’s new memoir, his father, seemingly high on cocaine, calls his son and asks him to mediate a family dispute. The author, sick of his addict father’s antics over the years, responds by hanging up on him and, we are made to believe, ending or at least severely curtailing the relationship. The exchange that ensues as the next chapter opens illustrates perfectly what’s wrong in this undercooked, self-solemn... MORE >
By Joshua Cohen | January 18, 2011 | 8:47 pm
This. Is. A. Sentence. And so is this. As is anything we might cram between a majuscule, or a capital letter, and a period. Those innovations—capitalization, punctuation—were products of Carolingian manuscripture: the handwriting that appeared in the monasteries during the reign of Charlemagne.... MORE >
The cerulean warbler--small, blue, North American songbird with its population in decline--is having a moment. 2010 offered the book industry no (living) break-out star. It seems, however, that in the cerulean warbler, benevolent celestial body Jonathan Franzen gave us a literary figure on which future books can ride his bestselling... MORE >
By Bill Wasik | January 11, 2011 | 7:45 pm
Near the beginning of The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin's definitive, infuriating history of the myth that vaccines cause autism, the author relates a story from a Park Slope dinner party he attended in 2007. Mr. Mnookin was discussing pediatric health with a new parent in his early 40s who explained that he and his wife had decided to delay their child's vaccines. On what sources had he based this weighty decision? Questions along these... MORE >
By Elizabeth Gumport | January 11, 2011 | 7:39 pm
While the only child has parents, and friends, and may someday have a spouse and children, one kind of human relationship will always be foreign to her. Lacking siblings, the only child is well acquainted with solitude, and less likely to equate being alone with being lonely, or at least accepts a certain degree of lonesomeness as the natural way of things. More than most people, only children feel their selves to be the... MORE >
Today O: A Presidential Novel publisher Simon & Schuster offered up a few more scraps of information about the Obama-era Primary Colors. Their publicity department... MORE >
Simon & Schuster is quietly publishing an anonymously authored novel called O: A Presidential... MORE >
By Elizabeth Gumport | January 4, 2011 | 8:27 pm
The burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee may have been the first modern celebrity: the first to be famous for being famous, and the first to admit to a total lack of talent. "If you're Gypsy Rose Lee," Lee herself liked to say, "all you have to do is keep your strength up so you can carry your money to the bank." She wasn't a gifted singer or dancer, or even especially beautiful.... MORE >
Independent booksellers have license to smirk as Borders' precarious finances force publishers to halt shipments to the retail giant. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Inc. is the first to stop shipping books to Border's retail locations, reports the The Wall Street Journal, with Hachette Book Group and Sourcebook, Inc considering the... MORE >
By The Editors | December 20, 2010 | 9:57 am
Ahead of Christmas day, when e-book sales are sure to be at their highest, Random House has assembled a guide to e-book purchasing that is available as an e-book at the Knopf site, as well as at other online book vendors. It's been dubbed The eBook... MORE >
"We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists," begins the fiction piece in the latest issue of the literary journal n+1. "Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel." The narrator is a female playwright obsessed with becoming a world-renowned genius. It's still a distant goal, but, she says, one good thing about being a woman is that there aren't many examples of female... MORE >
New York Magazine book reviewer Sam Anderson shared a selection of the notes he made in books over the past year for The Millions' Year in Reading feature and the result is thoroughly amusing. As he says in his introduction, "it's the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism... MORE >
Devan Sipher, a four-year veteran of The New York Times' "Weddings & Celebrations" section, has sold a roman à clef at auction to Penguin imprint NAL, Publisher's Marketplace reports. Check out TV's 11 Best Watercooler Moments of the Year. >> According to PM, the novel is "loosely based on the author's life, about a wedding columnist who can't find a bride of his own." It's the first of a two-book deal that sold at... MORE >
By Matthew Hunte | December 14, 2010 | 6:38 pm
A review of 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker is fraught with complications, the least of which is the risk of pissing off an entire literary generation. These difficulties spring from the impetus for the enterprise: This anthology, unlike, say, the Best American Series, originated from a showcase for writers, a magazine and publishers--Farrar, Strauss, Giroux publishes 5 of the 20 writers on the list--not necessarily... MORE >
By Jonathan Liu | December 14, 2010 | 6:10 pm
R. Christopher Whalen is not a historian. He's not an economist, either, at least not in the peer-reviewed sense. This shouldn't preclude his writing a credible economic history, except that he's the scariest sort of non-scholar: the wide-ranging, not to say dilettantish, practitioner who thinks himself a polymath. That is, an... MORE >
