melville house
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Satan is Everywhere
Watch 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…
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Choosing Sides
Andrew 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…
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For Whom Amazon Tolls
As 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…
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
Shakespeare 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…
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Amazon Opens Eastern Front
As 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.…
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Is There Too Much Translation?
Writing 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…
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Textbooks That Spy
Technology 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…
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Book Industry Forecast
Who 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…
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The Art of the Novella Subscription Series
Forget 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…
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Leigh Stein at BOMBLOG
This 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…
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Bolaño: The Last Interview
“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,…
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Notable New York, This Week 10/19-10/25
This 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…