New York Times
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Remembering Poet Claudia Emerson
The poetry community has been mourning what seems like an exceptional number of losses in the past few months; the New York Times remembrance of Claudia Emerson marks yet another. Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2005 collection The…
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A History of the New York Times Notable Books
For Salon, Laura Miller dug through two decades’ worth of the New York Times Notable Books to see how the list has evolved over the years.
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Is Our Art Failing Us?
In his “Cross Cuts” column for the New York Times, A.O. Scott explains how, “in the midst of [our] hard times,” he feels as if “art is failing us.” Following his introductory essay, he asked a group of panelists some…
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Changing Shakespeare
A French public library has discovered that the institution possesses a rare ‘first folio’ of the works of William Shakespeare. There are many first folios, but these earliest anthologies all contain variations in the texts. (The writing we have come…
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Exploring the “Russian Soul”
For the New York Times, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser share their experiences reading 19th century Russian literature. While Prose shows an appreciation for the timeless themes of Tolstoy and Gogol, Moser contends that what makes 19th century Russian writers distinctive is the…
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Tart, Mitchell, and Gaiman to the Rescue
After years of financial struggle, Barnes & Noble’s enlists renowned authors like Donna Tart, David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman to help compete with Amazon this holiday season. While Tart and Mitchell will contribute thousands of signed books to helps bolster…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday evening, Phil Klay’s Redeployment won the National Book Award for fiction, making it the first short story collection to win the award since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever in 1996. That’s 18 years. But what’s maybe more startling is…
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Flynn and Strayed, Together At Last
Cheryl Strayed and Gillian Flynn discuss ladies and likability in their writing: It never occurred to me, not once, that the book would be read as an inspirational tale. I really have no interest in likability when it comes to…
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The Making of Michael Pietsch
Amazon and Hachette have, for now, resolved their dispute. But their protracted battle over pricing has made Hachette’s Chief Executive Michael Pietsch something of a hero to many in the literary community—in Distinction, Pietsch discusses his journey from a small Boston publishing…
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Light Reading
Why do readers love to hate the Times’s Style section? While many of its trend pieces are guilty of the same transgressions committed elsewhere in mainstream media, a history of misogyny and homophobia directed at lifestyle journalism suggests our contempt goes…
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The Private Eye Period Piece
For a while now, such characters, if not totally extinct, have been on a steady life-support drip of nostalgia. In an age when GPS tracking, oversharing and 8 Signs Your Man Is Cheating listicles make their services unnecessary, the old-school…
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Streaming the Book Fair, Olympic-Style
According to a report in the New York Times, PBS will be live-streaming the Miami Book Fair at Dade College later this month. Representatives at PBS cite a strong correlation between public television watchers and book consumers, and will be…