Tag Archives: Books

Did you Know?, General

Are books getting too cheap?

 

 

Dirt-cheap [e-] books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.

Are books getting too cheap? via MOBYLIVES

Did you Know?

Writers and their Libraries

 

 

There’s a long tradition of writers writing about their libraries. Some of the first modern essays—by Michel de Montaigne and Sir Francis Bacon—are on that very subject. Among more recent publications, you might enjoy Anne Fadiman’s collection Ex Libris or Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. The trouble with people writing about their libraries is, well, every writer has one. It’s like writing about your left hand. Or your M.F.A. program. But McMurtry is a special case. If he had never written Lonesome Dove or The Last Picture Show, he would be famous—at least among collectors—as one of the country’s most respected dealers in used and rare books. When he writes about his library, he always has something interesting to say.

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via Paris Review Daily

Did you Know?, General, Information

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read…”

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute — the foundation of the human condition — and should be better.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa, address to the Swedish Academy, Dec. 7, 2010

(via)

Book Reviews, Did you Know?, Information

National Book Award Nominees, 2010

Here are the National Book Award Nominees, for 2010:

Fiction

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Fiction Judges: Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray,
Joanna Scott, Carolyn See

Nonfiction

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group)

John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq
(W.W. Norton & Co/The New Press )

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
(Doubleday)

Nonfiction Judges: Blake Bailey, Marjorie Garber, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Seth Lerer, Sallie Tisdale

Poetry

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)

James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)

C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)

Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Poetry Judges: Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson,
Jeffrey McDaniel, Brenda Shaughnessy

Young People’s Literature

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)

Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
(Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)

Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)

Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Young People’s Literature Judges:Laban Carrick Hill, Kelly Link,
Tor Seidler, Hope Anita Smith, Sara Zarr

For more info, see http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

Did you Know?, General

“Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,”

Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC – one of my favorite bookstores in the country – recently passed on.  Before moving on…she had the following interaction with one of her customers (this anecdote is from a tribute shared on the Politics & Prose website):

Cohen sometimes responded to customers in a less-then-politic way: “Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,” she would say to a customer asking for a book of which she disapproved. “You would enjoy this a lot more — and it’s a far better book.”

Now that is a bookseller, par excellence: she knew her stuff (books) and her customers.

Farewell Carla, I appreciate all that you have taught me (Adam) from afar.