February 13, 2013 On the Shelf The Maurice Sendak School, and Other News By Sadie Stein Pablo Neruda’s body will be exhumed in search for answers to his suspicious death, in 1973. Was he poisoned by the Pinochet regime? As he said, forgetting is so long. U.S. and U.K.: two nations separated by slightly different cover art aesthetics. Which do you prefer? Three buyers are vying for Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books; all three contenders are apparently local. Brooklyn’s PS 118 will henceforth be known as the Maurice Sendak Community School. We were going to share with you the Craigslist posting for an attractive copy editor, but it has been flagged for removal.
February 12, 2013 On the Shelf Hypothetical Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein “But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an ‘immaculately factual’ recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.” Cold blood, indeed! Douglas Coupland makes some very nice furniture. E-readers: not big in Japan. Readers have rallied around Maine’s Longfellow Books, badly damaged in the weekend’s blizzard. “I never realized what this store means to people until this weekend,” says the owner. Bad hypothetical book proposals.
February 11, 2013 On the Shelf “A Reverse Fahrenheit 451,” and Other News By Sadie Stein Sharon Olds, Lena Dunham, and Jennifer Egan on The Bell Jar. Dark horse Antonio Munoz Molina wins the Jerusalem Book Prize. Little-known books, blockbuster adaptations: a bittersweet colloquy. The romance author Jessica Blair is really an eighty-nine-year-old vet named Bill, who has no problem with his nom de plume. In “a reverse Fahrenheit 451,” firefighters carry books to safety.
February 8, 2013 On the Shelf The Man in Black, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.” (When questioned, Goedde clarified, “I don’t plan on moving this forward—it was a statement.”) “Jane Austen has been dead for close to two hundred years, but it’s hard to imagine she’s gotten much rest in her grave in Westminster Abbey, what with all the rewrites, updates and zombifications of her work.” Enough already! says Carolyn Kellogg. “Son, where are your books on trains?” On selling books to Johnny Cash. (Spoiler: as amazing as it sounds.) Yes, there is a hotel designed to look like Joseph Conrad’s steamer. Ten hotels based on literature.
February 7, 2013 On the Shelf The Best-Read City in America, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The ordinary, mild-mannered bookstore had stripped off its everyday shirt to reveal its superpowers, moving with a slamming shift into warp-speed pleasure.” A paean to vanished bookstores. How to (if you must) divest yourself of books. Here is a trademark lawsuit involving both space marines and superheroes. Yes, I said space marines. “The precision and spirit of Austen’s novels derive, in part, from the cherished objects with which she and her heroines were in daily contact—things that might well have been overlooked or spurned by everyone else.” Washington, D. C. earns the title of Most Literate City. The Most Romantic crown, however, goes to Knoxville, Tennessee. (If you define romance as only shopping at Amazon.com, of course.)
February 6, 2013 On the Shelf Bookish Heroism, and Other News By Sadie Stein Before they were stars: the wayward youth of Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and more. (And it was wayward!) Bookish, a new website created by Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, has launched. Check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s riposte to Philip Roth! How one man saved eight thousand precious volumes amid the violence in Timbuktu. We are psyched about the new Believer podcast, The Organist. A. L. Kennedy: “From here I can see the spine of The Wind in the Willows—the same volume I read in bed when I was a child. It has been my friend for more than 40 years, there for me, a kind light. Here is the volume of Raymond Carver I threw across the room when I was a student because it was so amazing, so tender with broken people. Here is Alasdair Gray and his mind-blowing Lanark, which taught me the courage inherent in thinking and creating when I had no courage of my own. Here is my library.”