November 22, 2013 On the Shelf The Book Thieves, and Other News By Sadie Stein Herewith, one million dollars worth of comic books. A new Russian app seeks to prevent e-book piracy. After years of risible purple prose, a call to celebrate good sex writing in fiction. While we’re at it, why not get some more illustrated adult books?
November 21, 2013 On the Shelf Let the Memory Live Again, and Other News By Sadie Stein The NBAs (you know, the book ones) have come and gone for another year. And the winners are … Meanwhile, E. L. Doctorow, who was awarded the 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contributors to American Letters, called the Internet “ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do.” Peter Rabbit, Jay Gatsby, and eleven other characters you wish would snap out of it. Following the 2012 death of T. S. Eliot’s widow, Eliot’s estate is going on the block. (At the end of the day, it seems nothing is as valuable as Cats!)
November 20, 2013 On the Shelf RIP Charlotte Zolotow, and Other News By Sadie Stein Charlotte Zolotow has died, at ninety-eight. So, what would Aldous Huxley do? C. S. Lewis has been inducted into the famed Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Sales of hardcover books are surprisingly brisk.
November 19, 2013 On the Shelf Well, This Is Depressing, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Oxford Word of the Year is … selfie. Here is a series of cowboy poets, looking very authentically cowboy-ish indeed. Well, swell. Right-wing extremists destroyed a statue of the poet Radnóti Miklós, who died during the Holocaust, and are burning his books. “Wonderful Doris Lessing has died. You never expect such rock-solid features of the literary landscape to simply vanish. It’s a shock.” Margaret Atwood salutes the late laureate.
November 18, 2013 On the Shelf RIP Doris Lessing, and Other News By Sadie Stein Doris Lessing has died at ninety-four. “The adamant child became the adamant adult. She truly had ice in her veins. She believed that her insight and her talent were unique, and she may well have been right.” Justin Cartwright pays tribute. Library copies of Fifty Shades of Grey have been found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine. How Philip Roth gets geriatric sex wrong.
November 15, 2013 On the Shelf Full-Color Book Espresso Machines, and Other News By Sadie Stein The first full-cover book espresso machine comes to Books-a-Million of Portland, Maine. Bukowski in Hollywood. Google wins its epic book-scanning battle. Michiko Kakutani loves the phrase “deeply felt.”