From The New Yorker: In November, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference in New York to announce a deal to bring a new Amazon headquarters to Queens. The event felt familiar: two ambitious politicians, side by side, explaining that a large company had promised to create thousands of jobs … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: After the death of a king or queen, a royal biography is duly commissioned. It appears, appropriately reverent, its subject cleansed of blemishes and imperfection. Such was the case in 1959, six years after Queen Mary, the wife of King George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, had died … Read more
From Fishwrap: During the mid-19th century, the abolitionist movement gained strength in the Northern United States. Free states prohibited slavery, but many of those living in slave states were forced to suffer backbreaking work and constant forms of degradation. In 1847, one heroic mother, a freed slave, received a letter from the master of her two daughters. She … Read more
From The New York Review of Books: We live in a golden age of reissues. Every publishing season seems to bring fresh editions from a vital but ignored past: say, Clarice Lispector, who had one book come out last year, or Lucia Berlin, who had two. For readers, republication offers something rare: the possibility of … Read more
From The Hollywood Reporter: Andrew Colborn was leading a quiet life as a police officer in the Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, Sheriff’s Department when his face first flashed across millions of screens around the world. It was December 2015 and the docuseries Making a Murderer had just premiered on Netflix, becoming one of its first genuine unscripted hits. … Read more
Nothing to do with books, but PG thinks he’s not the only one who enjoys stories and movies about art thieves. From The New Yorker: Long before the burglar Vjeran Tomic became the talk of Paris, he honed his skills in a graveyard. Père Lachaise, the city’s largest cemetery, is a Gothic maze of tombstones, … Read more
From The New Yorker: How do writers find their stories? The answers to that question are as varied as the stories they tell. This week, we’re bringing you pieces from The New Yorker’s archive in which authors pull back the curtain, revealing where their ideas come from and how they are transformed into art. In a series of … Read more
From The Nation: In 1998, an art collector named William Arnett arrived in Wilcox County, Alabama. Over the next two years, he went door to door in the African-American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, asking women if he could see their quilts: vivid, off-kilter assemblages of worn denim, outgrown school dresses and other salvaged bits of … Read more
From CNBC: Amazon upgraded its popular Kindle Paperwhite eReader on Tuesday with new features that align it more with last year’s Kindle Oasis — but this device is more than $100 cheaper. The Kindle Paperwhite is probably the e-reader you should buy if you’re in the market for a new one, but only if the following features sound … Read more
From Nerdy Book Club: Long ago and not so long, I drove over to have a look at the little village of Whiteleaf in the Chiltern Hills where I was born and lived until I was sixteen. A huddle of cottages crouching under a majestic hill, surrounded by beechwoods, magical as all childhood places (or … Read more
From The London Review of Books: I have never felt the need to call myself a feminist, no matter how often my late-developed gender awareness tells me I ought to be one. In my primary school in China in the mid-1980s, the most ferocious person in class was a girl. She used to carry a tree … Read more
From The Washington Post: If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, but I’ve been irritated for a long time by Banned Books Week. Despite my unqualified support for the freedom to read, the annual celebration, which began Sunday, has always struck me as shrill and inaccurate. I know the American Booksellers Association, the American Library … Read more
From The Paris Review: Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained … Read more
From The New York Times: Just how much control did the artist Robert Indiana have over his work during the last years of his life? A lot, according to two of the artist’s associates: his caretaker in Maine, Jamie L. Thomas, and a New York art publisher, Michael McKenzie, who worked closely with the artist. … Read more
From The Literary Hub: For some of you, school is officially in full swing. The newness has worn off a bit, and the dreaded homework has set in. Perhaps you’re already tired of it all. Officially, I am here to tell you: stay in school. School is worthwhile and our dismal public education system is … Read more
From The New Yorker: Tomorrow is Labor Day, and this weekend we’re bringing you stories about workers’ experiences and workers’ rights. In “Thin Yellow Line,” Lizzie Widdicombe profiles Bhairavi Desai, the organizer who founded New York City’s taxi-driver union, when she was just twenty-six; in “Dignity,” William Finnegan meets the fast-food workers fighting for a higher … Read more
From The New York Review of Books: Menopause: the ceasing of menstruation or the period in a woman’s life (typically between forty-five and fifty-five). I stare stupidly at it. It’s nothing much to look at. It’s only a small pile of clothing: the shorts and tank top that I wear in bed, which I have … Read more
From The Smithsonian: Numbers came easily to Angeline Nanni. As a girl of 12 in rural Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, she kept the books in her father’s grocery store. In high school, she took all the accounting classes on offer. Enrolled in beauty school after graduation—cosmetology being one of the few fields open to … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: When the novelist Philip Roth died in May, the obituaries and tributes agreed that he was (to quote a few choice descriptions) “towering,” “pre-eminent” and a “giant of the American novel.” In the opinion of those who create the official narrative of American literature—the critics who write about it, the … Read more
From The New Yorker: Wars are hard to comprehend. They’re so vast, with so many complex causes and effects, that they beggar our imaginations; they’re also irreducibly personal, shaping countless individual fates in ways we struggle to grasp. This week, we’re bringing you pieces about war from The New Yorker’s archive. . . . . For Londoners, … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: We’ve been struggling with our picture book section at the shop for some time now, and by “struggling” I mean that while the category is selling well once we locate the suggested title, often the finding of that exact book has been a bit of a challenge for frontline booksellers in a hurry. The last two years … Read more
From Hyperallergic: On June 19 of this year, artist Sir Anish Kapoor, a knighted and “renowned visionary sculptor,” filed a copyright infringement claim in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, alleging that the National Rifle Association (NRA) used a fleeting image of one of his sculptures without permission in … Read more
From Bomb Magazine: “First Impressions” consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017, all of which are cited below. After collecting every first sentence, I found they fell into a number of patterns, some surprising, others obvious: points of view, different tenses, … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: In 1983, country singer George Strait scored a major hit with a cover of the modern ballad “Amarillo by Morning.” The lyrics describe life on the rodeo circuit: overnight drives to the next stop, bones broken by falls from the saddle and relationships fractured by distance. But the song ends on … Read more
From The New York Review of Books: My first encounter with Anna Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross) was brief and painful. At some point in the mid-1990s—I must have been in tenth or eleventh grade—our German teacher announced that in the months to come we would be reading excerpts from an antiwar novel written … Read more
PG notes that the title of the OP is a classic example of damning with faint praise. From Publishers Weekly: The four large publicly traded consumer publishers that recently reported their financial results for the quarter ended March 31 were all able to point to some good financial news. HarperCollins had the best results, with … Read more
From Brevity: Sometime after having a baby, and making a fateful decision to ditch grad school to pursue a writing career, I had this notion that writing while mothering would be easy. I imagined working from home would be orderly, convenient and efficient. It was simple. I would write in the quiet moments before our hectic morning … Read more
From The New Yorker (December 21, 1940): A bossy, yellow-haired blonde named Mazie P. Gordon is a celebrity on the Bowery. In the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all-night restaurants which specialize in pig snouts and cabbage at a dime a platter, she is known by her first name. She makes a round of these establishments … Read more
From Aeon: Every month or so, I see a patient called Fraser in my primary care clinic, a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after coming home, he is still haunted by flashbacks of burning buildings and sniper fire. He doesn’t work, rarely goes out, sleeps poorly, and to relieve his emotional anguish … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Even the most accomplished readers get stuck in a rut, defaulting to books in a genre they know they’ll enjoy instead of taking a chance on something different. But publishing professionals and readers who regularly flick between genres say you can find a new groove by looking to reliable sources … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Barbara Taylor Bradford, 84, is the author of 36 novels, including “A Woman of Substance.” . . . . I saw my name in print for the first time when I was 10. My mother sent one of the little stories I had been writing to the Children’s Magazine in … Read more
From Writer Unboxed: Have you ever felt out of place? I’m sure. We all have. Meeting the new in-laws. An interfaith church service. Asking the price of a necklace at Tiffany’s. The ER. CIA headquarters in Langley. Strange environments where people are different. One summer day commuting to work on my bike, I stopped at … Read more
From The New Yorker: If you wanted to hear the future in late May, 1968, you might have gone to Abbey Road to hear the Beatles record a new song of John Lennon’s—something called “Revolution.” Or you could have gone to the decidedly less fab midtown Hilton in Manhattan, where a thousand “leaders and future leaders,” … Read more
From the Amazon Press Room: Amazon celebrated its biggest holiday season with customers all around the world shopping at record levels. Prime membership continued to grow this holiday – in fact, in one week alone, more than four million people started Prime free trials or began paid memberships, to benefit from free two-day, one-day or … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Like Condoleezza Rice, Ivanka Trump and Michelle Obama, Orly Lobel played with Barbie dolls when she was growing up. “Fortunately,” writes the San Diego law professor in her new book, “I was also encouraged to challenge the distorted realities of Barbie’s world.” No toy has been deconstructed so thoroughly as … Read more
PG hopes that everyone had a lovely break (or continues to be having a lovely break). Christmas at Casa PG was wonderful and active. Excited children definitely increase the energy level around the place and PG enjoyed that a lot. He predicts each member of his posterity will be a world-class sprinter, decathlete or smuggler. One … Read more
In the course of a December tour in Yorkshire, I rode for a long distance in one of the public coaches, on the day preceding Christmas. The coach was crowded, both inside and out, with passengers, who, by their talk, seemed principally bound to the mansions of relations or friends to eat the Christmas dinner. … Read more
From The New Yorker: Children’s books, like children themselves, come in for a fair amount of scolding, whether it’s the periodic “family values” attacks on books like “Heather Has Two Mommies” or the international stir kicked up just last month when an English mum argued that the non-consensual wakeup kiss at the end of “Sleeping Beauty” … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Some books arrive labeled “can’t miss,” or have such a hefty advance that publishers do everything they can to assure that they won’t miss. But what about the sleepers? Those books that worked their way through the publishing pipeline quietly, launch with little buzz, and somehow find their way to bestseller lists … Read more
From Aeon: Stress pervades our lives. We become anxious when we hear of violence, chaos or discord. And, in our relatively secure world, the pace of life and its demands often lead us to feel that there is too much to do in too little time. This disrupts our natural biological rhythms and encourages unhealthy … Read more
From The Literary Hub: What was the first book you fell in love with? In my early childhood I lived in my grandfather’s somber house, where my mother found shelter with her three babies after her husband abandoned her. It was the 1940s, at the end of the Second World War, in Chile. We, children, … Read more
From Electric Lit: In a lawsuit filed September 14, a former Swarthmore College baseball player named Charles Green accused Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding, of stealing significant plot points from Green’s unpublished autobiographical novel, Bucky’s 9th. “The two baseball novels bear a substantial similarity that could occur only as a result of Harbach’s access to a version … Read more
From The New Yorker: In Webster County, Nebraska, the prairie rolls in waves, following the contours of a tableland gouged by rivers and creeks. At the southern edge of the county, a few hundred feet north of the Nebraska-Kansas border, is a six-hundred-acre parcel of land called the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. Cather spent much of her … Read more
From The Literary Hub: As a child, books were your refuge. The entirety of book-world was your tribe. The March family taught you morals; Anne of Green Gables, especially if you were like me, an unruly kid with reddish braids, gave you hope. Maybe Brian Robeson in Hatchet made you believe you could survive anything. The Lord of the … Read more
From Smithsonian: As part of the festivities to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating 50 years on the throne, the Queen hosted dozens of foreign rulers at a lavish banquet. She led a grand procession to Westminster Abbey in open carriage, escorted by the Indian cavalry, greeted screaming crowds on her palace balcony, and enjoyed fireworks … Read more
From Vanity Fair: Danielle Steel’s wildly popular novels have made her a household name. . . . . Ahead of her new book, Fairytale, being published next month, take a look at where Steel’s best-sellers are brought to life, at her desk in San Francisco. . . . . My beloved, partially handmade 1946 Olympia standard typewriter. I’ve … Read more
From The Literary Hub: As transmitted by my screenwriter aunt, Harriet Frank, Jr., who was our family narrator, the central myth of our family concerned my paternal grandmother and the way she reinvented herself in 1939. After ten long and unhappy years toughing it out during the Depression in Portland, Oregon, Huffy (as she was known in … Read more
From Margaret Atwood via The Paris Review: At the end of February 2012, I was sitting in a bar in the Chicago Hilton, discussing Ray Bradbury. I was staying at the Hilton, and in a moment of Bradburian weirdness, I had been put into the suite where President Obama saw on TV that he had … Read more
From Granta: When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker for Offshore in 1979, she spent the prize money on a trip to New York for herself, her daughter Tina, and Tina’s husband Terence Dooley (Fitzgerald’s future literary executor). It wasn’t the no-expense-spared jaunt of a lifetime one might assume an unexpected, sixty-three-year-old recipient of the world’s foremost literary … Read more
From Nasdaq: Many have lauded the recent opening of Amazon.com’s eight brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. as a death blow to independent bookstores. Since its launch in 1995 as an online retailer of books, Amazon has been blamed for the closing of bookstores nationwide because thanks to its wide-selection and low prices. In an act … Read more