May 10, 2012 On the Shelf Browning at 200, Publishers at 83 By Sadie Stein Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Lethem are among the seven hundred writers and cultural marchers who signed a letter protesting the planned revamp of the New York Public Library. Dickens isn’t the only one turning two hundred! Wishing a happy bicentenary to Robert Browning. Madame Bovary, the pie chart. The James Joyce papers go digital. Maurice Sendak’s books thrilled children and terrified adults. And speaking of Sendak, more memories and tributes. Rock 27 is publishing eighty-three.
May 9, 2012 On the Shelf Remembering Sendak, Gaining Honors By Sadie Stein Book sales around the world in real time. America’s Next Top Writer? The Columbia custodian turned Columbia honors grad! Maurice Sendak’s life in pictures. Sendak speaking on his eightieth birthday.
May 8, 2012 On the Shelf Rushdie Is Bored, Pynchon Goes Public By Sadie Stein The creator of publishing tumblr Real Talk has unmasked herself! It’s GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman. Salman Rushdie pronounces Middlemarch boring. A great what-if: Bond by Hitchcock. The seven best dinner parties in literature? We say Anna Karenina was robbed! Brace yourselves for Pynchon in Public Day.
May 7, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Communes, Literary Parodies: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein February House, a musical about the famed Brooklyn Heights brownstone that housed Truman Capote, W. H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee (left), Carson McCullers, and Benjamin Britten, is being created based on Sherrill Tippins’s 2005 book of the same name. Were4 rt thou Rmo? The Bard in text form. A guide to philosophy in literature. Paulo Coelho will be selling his e-books for less than a dollar. A Florida library has officially banned Fifty Shades of Grey. Meanwhile, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey will be coming to a bookstore near you.
May 4, 2012 On the Shelf Bacon, Sci-Fi, and Feuds By Sadie Stein The literary feud hall of fame! Ploughshares launches the fascinating First Drafts, in which writers discuss their revision process. Novelist Jane Rogers wins the UK’s science-fiction prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for The Testament of Jessie Lamb. The future of the e-reader? Neil Gaiman’s reading and listening list. New York’s children’s bookstore Books of Wonder plays host to a bacon bakery.
May 3, 2012 On the Shelf Beautiful Bookshelves, Rule Breaking, and More! By Sadie Stein The Tehran International Book Fair cracks down on “harmful” titles. “Poets break all the rules. When other writers take their photos outdoors, poets stay inside. They’re the only ones who wear hats or leather jackets with nothing underneath.” Target will no longer be in the Kindle business. (A sentence that would have mystified our forebears.) “The passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.” A gallery of beautiful bookshelves.