2015
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A World Without Hope
At Salon, Gerry Canavan compares the bleakness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the gain and loss of hope in Star Wars: Star Wars has always been, in the EU at least, a universe more or less without hope, that only…
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
A Saudi Arabian bookstore chain has removed Donald Trump’s book from its shelves because of offensive comments the real estate developer and reality television star has made during his presidential campaign. A bookstore in Saratoga Springs bookstore found itself the…
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Better Read Saul
Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. At The Daily Beast, Michael Weiss writes a long and thoughtful essay on Saul Bellow and his often overlooked…
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The Value of a Face
Rachel Vorona Cote writes about how people use beauty to undermine the words of women: I understood, as I continue to understand with distressing nuance, that too many men navigate the terror of women’s brilliance by reducing them to skin…
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The One-Man Publishing House
Gabriel Levinson just might operate one of the world’s smallest independent publishers. ANTIBOOKCLUB releases just one book a year and each title is the product of the one-man publisher who serves as editor, marketer, promoter, and bookkeeper. Brooklyn-based Levinson has…
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The Small Face of Equity
I was twenty-four and I knew everything. I knew about justice; I knew about respect. I knew everyone in the world had it in them.
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Visiting Kafka
Over at the New York Times, David Farley writes about Prague and its connections to Kafka, from the 36-foot high Kafka head made of forty-two rotating chrome plates to the various buildings that lay claim to his residence—all the hotspots for the…
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The Art of the Prostitute
Joseph Nechvatal writes for Hyperallergic on the Musée d’Orsay’s “splendid but miserable” collection of art from around Paris’s Belle Époque, a collection that focuses specifically on the representation of prostitutes in the period’s cultural climate.
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Return of Columbia House
The music subscription service is making a comeback, Stereogum reports, thanks to a bail-out from a former Lehman Brothers executive. You might remember Columbia House from junk mail offering twelve CDs for just a penny—tempting teens into joining a membership most notable…
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Beer and Books
Is the much loved bookseller Barnes & Noble turning into a nightclub? Not quite, but it is exploring the possibility of serving alcohol. The bookseller will be testing the sale of beer and wine at events in West Hartford before…
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Infinite Cover Redesigns
The Millions shows us the new fan-designed cover for the 20th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, as well as a short and sweet interview with Wallace’s editor and Little, Brown CEO Michael Pietsch.
