…An eternal poem etched on the roads of a town, a novelist who took a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail and lived to tell the tale, an NPR word nerdy piece that references my favorite book as a child…

In the snarky vein of Go The F*ck To Sleep, the book marketing sensation of recent internet meme fame, comes a new one: All My Friends Are Dead. It is zapping over the electron highway to a social network near you – and soon, very soon, probably to the bookshelves of at least half the [...]

Reposting this one for the week because our readers seemed to like it. Enjoy! Let’s talk about reading. Not reading material, but reading in terms of actual eyes to paper or screen, letter by letter, reading. I am the world’s slowest reader. When I was an associate agent at Writer’s House agency in New York [...]

What you need and what you read are conspicuously intertwined.

Here are a few things plucked from the land of social media that I may never have heard about otherwise: 1. THE SECRET GARDEN Penguin Classic embroidered book jacket: http://bit.ly/hDI2uX (Thanks @thebookmaven). I want all of these framed and in my hallway. Please help. 2. Ted Wilson Reviews the World #81 – “Hello, and welcome [...]

I’ll tell you a secret. I am an Atlantis freak. That is, I strongly believe that highly advanced human civilizations have risen and fallen perhaps countless times on our planet – with only a few broken down megaliths as evidence. Newsflash: Everything we make is impermanent, unless we make it absurdly huge (so as not [...]

Is Queens, NY and its crop of new authors taking up the slack where Brooklyn (and Jonathan Lethem) let up? Queens actually offers some coffee houses where writers can still plug in and type for hours without being kicked to the curb, and so, may indeed transform itself into a literary mecca one cafe at [...]

Here’s a wonderful thing for publishing and the environment: On Wednesday, November 10, 2010, at 1:00 PM Eastern Time 200 bloggers will take a stand to support books printed on environmental paper by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 such books. Launched in 2009 by Eco-Libris, this campaign is aiming to promote “green” books by reviewing 200 [...]

Comics. Have they been demoted to coffee break Facebook ephemera, or are they alive and kicking butt out in the Darwinian thunderdome of the litsphere? Regardless, some of the comic fodder found online right now is goddamn brilliant. For example, check out The Oatmeal. Here’s a teaser (click the banner). More serious comic book fare [...]

We intellectual types and artistic folk (please note that I am rolling my eyes as I type that) focus on appreciating good art so much of the time, but what about the bad art? Ok, so reading a bad book wastes a lot of our precious time so let’s not bother with that if we [...]

keep looking »