From PW Daily: Yesterday, Google announced a new feature tied to its Book Search program, a widget-like tool called Google Previews. By adding simple code to their Web sites, publishers, retailers or anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can embed a Google-hosted preview of up to 20% of any book that has been included in the Google Book Search database. Fabulous! Excerpts are gateway drugs. I’ll see if we can add this “simple code” and include samplings from books reviewed on FWR.
I still haven’t read one of her mysteries, but in 2005, Ayelet Waldman had me at hello with her infamous Modern Love essay — the one where she admits – blissfully – to loving her husband even more than her children. (Bonus: said husband is Michael Chabon.) Now Waldman is channeling some of that passion toward electing Barack Obama, who she first met in law school. She’s launched a Books for Barack fundraising drive. In a widely circulated email, Waldman called for writers to donate signed copies of their books, including rare collectibles and first editions, to offer as gifts […]
Last Tuesday night I joined over 300 neighbors and book lovers in the lobby of BAM-Harvey to rally support for an independent bookstore in Fort Greene. The event was sponsored by FGIBI, or the Fort Greene Independent Bookstore Initiative (FGIBI), and its guest of honor was Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, winner of the 2007 Brooklyn Public Library PowerUp! prize for her business plan to open an independent bookstore in Brooklyn (and publicity/events coordinator at McNally Jackson). FGIBI formed after a survey by the Fort Greene Retailers Association showed that 75% of respondents prioritize having a bookstore (as opposed to other types […]
In a world insatiable for celebrity access, where there are reality shows about reality shows, and magazines shriek that the stars are “just like us!” whenever one buys a latte, pops out a baby, or heads for rehab, it seems redundant to ask if we’ve gone too far. But that’s exactly what Theresa Rebeck does with Three Girls and Their Brother, and, for the most part, it works.
The Book Design Review is one of my favorite book blogs. Earlier this month, Joseph Sullivan published what he hopes will be “the first of many” interviews on the site. Read about the inspiration and process behind Art Director Lisa Fyfe’s design of Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (August 2008, Henry Holt).
Jack Handey tells NY Times readers how to find the humor section in a bookstore. One deep thought: Some scientists bemoan the fact that it’s so hard to find humor in bookstores. But I prefer to look at it philosophically. I think it was Robert E. Lee who said, “It is well that the Humor section is so terribly hard to find, lest we laugh too much.”
Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. The View from the Seventh Layer is a rich, ethereal collection: here are fables, ghost stories, romances (among them a sci-fi adaptation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog”), personal histories, anxieties of influence, and spiritual bursts — even a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul. These stories unfold in worlds just shy of our own, where metaphors take literal form. Each explores the […]
