melville house
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Books Save Lives
You know all those movies in which a character is shot in the chest, only to be miraculously saved by a pocket Bible, and everyone in the audience rolls their eyes? Well, it turns out that books actually are bulletproof—to…
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Zuckerberg is No Oprah
The first meeting of the Facebook book club was a little like Fight Club: nobody talked about it. Perhaps it was Zuckerberg’s choice of book—The End of Power by Moisés Naím—or maybe he simply doesn’t have the cultural cachet of…
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Worthwhile Work
Dissatisfaction among the modern white-collar working class might stem from the fact that many jobs simply don’t feel necessary. Strike! Magazine has been advertising on the London Underground with quotes from David Graeber’s 2013 essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit…
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Who Robbed Mark Twain’s Grave?
Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, a dastardly criminal (or Mark Twain superfan) stole a bronze plaque of Twain’s profile from his gravestone in Elmira, N.Y. At Melville House, former Elmira resident Alex Shephard examines the city’s complicated relationship with…
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This Week in Short Fiction
With the Senate Intelligence Committee’s online release of their Torture Report summary and Melville House’s announcement last week that it will publish a bound copy of the summary report at the end of this year, torture has been in the…
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The Return of Judy Blume
Judy Blume is back—at least for grown ups. Next summer, for the first time in 15 years, Judy Blume will release a novel aimed at adult readers. Melville House has the story.
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Melville House to Publish Torture Report
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.…
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Turning to Baldwin During Tragedy
Art 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…
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A Loss of Translation
The 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…
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Throwing Hachette to the Wolves
Amazon 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…
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Author Roboto
At 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…
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Author’s Notes
Writers 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…