The trailer for my friend John Kenney’s wonderful new debut novel, Truth in Advertising (available January 22). Best book trailer ever.
Categories: Books Tags: book trailers · publicity · video
The trailer for my friend John Kenney’s wonderful new debut novel, Truth in Advertising (available January 22). Best book trailer ever.
Categories: Books Tags: book trailers · publicity · video
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Categories: Books · Writing Tags: Ian McEwan · quotes for writers
The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Read the whole essay here. See also: Orwell on Why I Write.
Categories: Books Tags: George Orwell · writing links
Book trailer for The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game by my friend John Fox (on sale May 14). The footage shows the Kirkwell Ba’, an ancient “folk football” game played twice a year, on Christmas and New Years Day, in the streets of Kirkwall, a tiny coastal town in Orkney, northern Scotland.
Categories: Books · Sports Tags: book trailers · video
Graham Greene, 1964. Portrait by Yousuf Karsh.
Categories: Books · Photography · Writers Tags: Graham Greene · portraits of writers · Yousuf Karsh
I’ve just received a new shipment of these bookplates. They are for readers who would like a signed book but can’t make it to a book signing. If you’d like one, just email me with your address and, if you want a personal inscription, what you would like it to say. There is no charge. It’s just a way of saying “thank you” to readers. (Click the image to view full sized.)
A little background on the design. The woodcut illustration is by the artist Rockwell Kent. It was originally commissioned by the Antioch Bookplate Company for a mass-market bookplate in the 1950s. Those Antioch bookplates used to be very common. You could find them at any bookstore. They were tasteful, inexpensive and, for the genteel middle class, a little aspirational. (My mom had them.)
Kent was a prolific bookplate designer. Most of his work was for friends and private clients, though, like the plate on the left. (Source. More examples here and here. There is even a book on Kent’s bookplates.) The series he designed for Antioch made it possible for everyone to have a Rockwell Kent bookplate.
Antioch stopped printing bookplates a few years ago, but Karen Gardner has continued the business under the name Bookplate Ink, where you can still get many of the old Rockwell Kent designs.
Personally, I love Kent’s art. So when it came time to order a bookplate for my readers, I asked Karen if she would modify one of Kent’s designs to make a little more space for a signature and inscription, since the original design left only enough space for the owner’s name. I cribbed the “compliments of” line from a similar bookplate offered by Alain de Botton, and the result is what you see above.
I admit it’s a little loony to spend so much time thinking about bookplates. In the age of ebooks, soon there may be nothing to stick them on. All the more reason to enjoy them now.
Categories: Books · My Books Tags: bookplates · publicity · Rockwell Kent
Alexis Madrigal: “our collective memory of the past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it’s actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters.”
Categories: Books Tags: Alexis Madrigal · reading
Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript of The Great Gatsby (via)
Categories: Books · Writing Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald · manuscripts · The Great Gatsby
“There are lots of reasons to support local businesses, whether it’s mom-and-pop hardware stores or neighborhood farmers’ markets. But when you buy from an independent bookseller, you’re doing something more. You’re helping to keep alive an important force in making our national literary culture more diverse, interesting and delightful. Your shelves are full of books that wouldn’t be there if not for indie booksellers you’ve never met, struggling to get by in shops you’ve never heard of. That’s why it’s so important to support the one next door.”
Amen.
Categories: Books · Publishing Tags: Laura Miller · links
Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress, Amherst Historical Society, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2010 (photo: Annie Leibovitz, from Pilgrimage).
Categories: Art · Books · Photography Tags: Annie Leibovitz · Emily Dickinson
Lamb House was the home of Henry James from 1897, when he was 55, until his death in 1916. Below, the residence as it appeared in the late 1930s or early 1940s. To the left of the house, at the end of the high wall, is the garden room where in summer James did most of his writing. The garden room was destroyed by a bomb in August 1940.
Look here for more about Lamb House from Colm Toibin, whose portrait of Henry James, The Master, beautifully evokes James’s life at Lamb House. If you read The Master — and you should — you will want to know what Lamb House looks like.
Photos: Jim Linwood, doveson2008, both via Flickr.
Categories: Books · Writers Tags: Henry James
Phillies first-baseman Eddie Waitkus, Clearwater, Florida, 3/9/53 (source). On June 19, 1949, Waitkus was shot in the chest by a deranged fan, Ruth Ann Steinhagen, in a Chicago hotel room. The incident inspired the similar episode in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.
Categories: Books · Sports Tags: baseball · Bernard Malamud · The Natural
It is quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
Noam Chomsky
Categories: Books Tags: Noam Chomsky · quotes
See if you can discern the subtle pattern in these numbers. (Via.)
Categories: Books · Publishing Tags: ebooks
“This man is an author. He writes stories. He has just finished writing a story. He thinks many people will like to read it. So he must have the story made into a book. Let’s see how the book is made.”
Categories: Books · Publishing Tags: video
Book trailer for Andrew Zuckerman’s Wisdom
Categories: Books Tags: Andrew Zuckerman · book trailers · video
Two quotes pulled from Orwell’s classic 1940 essay on Charles Dickens.
Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character … because Dickens’s characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else.
And a little further on:
What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.
Categories: Books · Writers Tags: Charles Dickens · George Orwell
Book cover concept by Matt Roeser (via nevver). Great.
Categories: Books · Design Tags: book covers · Moby Dick