es, Christmas is over, but Hannukah is still in full swing–and plus, you know there’s a book-lover you’ve forgotten to gift. We at FWR are here for you with bookish gift ideas through the 31st.
So now we know why old books smell so good. But maybe you’d like to smell great, too? [...]

This holiday season, consider offering your writer-friends the gift of time–literally. And it’s available immediately, no waiting in line, for instant (and last-minute) gratification.
Offer to take their laundry to the laundromat for them–or pick up their groceries, or bring them a takeout dinner–every weekend for a month, freeing up a precious couple [...]

If you’re looking for gifts today–whether for Christmas or Hannukah–you’re officially down to the wire. May we suggest Clibe, a new app that turns your iPad into a journal?
Clibe allows you to type, doodle on photos, draw, annotate, and more to create virtual journals. Stored in the cloud (and therefore synced to your [...]

I am a huge fan of the board game Trivial Pursuit. In fact, my friends tease me because I own six different versions. But I’d never heard of this one and therefore don’t have it–a problem that will soon be rectified. Perhaps you know a book- and trivia-lover who would enjoy it [...]

In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.

We’ve talked about furniture made of books here before, but Big Cozy Books takes things to a whole other level. Designer Erik Olofson creates upholstered furniture pieces that look like giant books. The company offers loveseats, benches, booths, each with a specific title. They’re marketed towards schools and libraries, but if you’re [...]

In this wide-ranging review, Brad Wetherell looks at Tom Franklin’s newest novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and considers the way Franklin subverts genre expectations, as well as how e-readers like the Kindle have the potential to change readers’ expectations.

t’s sold under the rather prosaic name Metal Pen, but I prefer to think of it as the Perpetual Pen. Here’s the description:
In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. Generally known as Metalpoint, or Silverpoint when the stylus was [...]

This week’s feature is Debra Allbery’s new poetry collection, Fimbul-Winter. The book was published last year by Four Way Books and was the recipient of the 2010 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. Allbery is also the author of a previous collection of poems, Walking Distance, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University [...]

You’ve probably read about Amazon’s most recent promotion–they encouraged customers to use their price-check app in stores, scan an item, and then get an extra 5% discount for buying that item on Amazon instead. This promotion occasioned much ranting, including a piece by Richard Russo in the Times, and then a rant from an opposing [...]