Personal best: Can a book be a classic just because you say so?
That’s the question posed by Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books Classics, which recently celebrated 10 years of republishing underappreciated books like Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look...
View ArticleKirkus, Editor & Publisher going out of business
Someday the death of old media might be marked by the date of Dec. 10, 2009, the day that Nielsen Trade Papers announced it is closing Kirkus Review and Editor & Publisher, venerable trade...
View ArticleMcSweeney’s, Kirkus and the barely literate digital future
Trying to make sense of Kirkus’ closing in light of the enthusiastic demand for McSweeney’s newspaper project, the San Francisco Panorama, I find a barely literate blog post declaring the stupidity of...
View ArticleThree great women writers (at last!) get the biographies they deserve
This has been a terrific year for major biographies of under-appreciated or misunderstood women fiction writers. First came Brad Gooch’s “authoritative” biography of Flannery O’Conner, followed by...
View ArticleWrite a literary mash-up, win a laptop!
Wish you had thought of mashing up zombies and Jane Austin, thereby producing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, one of the commercial literary successes of recent times? Here’s your chance to redeem...
View ArticleGrammar books as Christmas presents (stay with me, I’m not kidding)
Well, not really grammar books, but books on English language usage, which can not only be invaluable but also (I swear to God) fun. A fine essay on H.W. Fowler in The New York Times inspires me to...
View ArticleKeillor bashes Jews, gays? Say it ain’t so, Gary!
Did Garrison Keillor, beloved host of NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and author of innumerable faintly schmaltzy books about Norwegians in Minnesota, veer dangerously close to anti-Semitism in a...
View ArticleBest mystery novels of 2009 chosen by Oline Cogdill, others
“Mysteries” as a literary genre has long since been a capacious category, embracing everything from traditional cozies and whodunnits to noir detective stories, police procedurals, crime capers,...
View ArticleDan Brown tops Christmas bestseller lists worldwide
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol has edged out The Guinness Book of World Records to become the No. 1 Christmas best seller in England, a victory for fiction at a time when nonfiction was expected to rule....
View ArticleThe electronic challenge to reading gains momentum
Kindle ebooks outsold traditional volumes on Christmas Day, while “vooks” — books augmented with video –grow in popularity. Is this the end of reading as we know it?! Not yet, but it’s a distinct...
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