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Join NOW!Melville House will publish the Senate Torture Report in paperback and e-book on December 30th. The report, released Tuesday, is currently available to read online, but Melville House hopes that publishing it in print form will reach a wider audience. “It’s probably the most important government document of our generation,” says co-publisher Dennis Johnson, “even […]
...moreArt has to be a confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with […]
...moreThe mismatch between quality and recognition in the world of translated fiction and nonfiction is surely more extreme than in any category of literature, and while this category has a growing number of great advocates, it deserves to have them at the highest level. At Melville House, Mark Krotov argues that the National Book Award […]
...moreAmazon and Hachette appear to have entered into a war of attrition, a battle that Hachette, with a more limited budget, is surely going to lose. Alone, Hachette will fall. News that Simon & Schuster easily signed a deal with Amazon was a major blow—and that might just be exactly what Amazon is counting on, […]
...moreAt Melville House, Liam O’Brien delves into the fictional and factual history of book-writing computers, from Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” to the Russian computer that rewrote Anna Karenina in the style of Murakami. With some media outlets already using bots to pen articles, he wonders if the robots will be coming for literature […]
...moreWriters and editors don’t always get along, but usually their squabbles remain private. Reviewer copies of Moriarty, a new Sherlock Holmes novel, were published and sent to places like the New York Times with notes from author Anthony Horowitz still included. The mistake reveals part of the sometimes secretive editing process, and, as Melville House […]
...moreWatch yourself. The intrepid investigators at Melville House discovered secret Satanic messages in John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van: It may seem farfetched to imagine a book which actually uses backmasked Satanist messages as a plot point would have the audacity to perpetrate these selfsame acts upon the reader, but we assure you this is […]
...moreAndrew Wylie, arguably the most powerful literary agent in the world, has chosen sides in the Amazon-Hachette battle for global domination, and he’s allied with Authors United. Wylie represents a slew of high-profile writers like Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, and V.S. Naipul—writers he has enlisted to join the 1,000-plus strong group fighting against Amazon. Alex […]
...moreAs the Amazon versus Hachette dispute drags on into its fifth month, Alex Shepard, over at Melville House, examines the conflict, and what it means for publishers and authors: Traditional publishers can’t do what Amazon does; Amazon can’t do what traditional publishers do (and no, the fact that bookstores don’t carry books published by Amazon is […]
...moreShakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention of Chinese audiences, reports Melville House’s Moby Lives, saying Shakespeare is “having a cultural moment.”
...moreAs Amazon and Hachette continue to battle it out, the online retailer has opened an eastern front, delaying shipments from Bonnier, a German publishing group. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association has filed an anti-trust complaint. Amazon, of course, denies the accusation. British booksellers are also concerned with Amazon as the retailer looks to impose new contract […]
...moreWriting over at Brooklyn Quarterly, Will Evans discusses why he founded a publishing house dedicated to translation: In addition to being a philosophical problem, literary translation is also a contentious business matter. There are thousands of good to all-time-great books published in the world every year in every language imaginable, but only a couple hundred of those […]
...moreTechnology might have made studying and homework faster and easier, but thanks to CourseSmart, a new digital textbook system that tracks students’ reading progress, teachers will now have a way to see who is skimming and who is skipping chapters in their textbooks. There is a lot of controversy over the new system, and academics […]
...moreWho doesn’t want to validate their decision to purchase an e-book by seeing it in physical form at a bookstore first? At Melville House, Dennis Johnson discusses how the rapid demise of Barnes & Noble is slowly sucking the life out of the e-book industry. According to a survey, nearly 40% of shoppers inspect a book […]
...moreForget magazines—for a small subscription fee, Melville House will send you two novellas every month in whatever format you prefer. It’s the perfect way to finally get around to reading classics like Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Also there are five novellas called The Duel, so if […]
...moreThis week’s installment of BOMB’s “Word Choice” is four poems by Leigh Stein, whose new collection, Dispatch from the Future, launches July 19th at Melville House. The poems, like Stein’s debut novel, The Fallback Plan—a depiction of after-college limbo—strike a powerful balance between humor and melancholy, reference and storytelling. In “Epistolaphobia,” Stein reflects on the attraction to the […]
...more“M.M.: What do you wish to do before dying? R.B.: Nothing special. Well, clearly I’d prefer not to die. But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she’s neither a lady nor very distinguished, but, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she’s a hot wench who will make your […]
...moreThis week, Chinua Achebe speaks, n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Jonathan Lethem reads, composer/drummer Bobby Previte with Psychedelic Furs’ Knox Chandler, photographer Jeff Wall presents more urban decay, “junkyard bohos” Huggabroomstik play, CMJ Music Marathon begins and Renée Fleming sings at the Met. MONDAY 10/19: Chinua Achebe, whose first book in […]
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