AbeBooks' Reading Copy

If you are writing a love letter today for your Valentine, then please heed the advice of Hilary Mantel, Alain de Botton and Jeanette Winterson, who have each offered tips on this difficult art in the Telegraph. Recorded delivery is a no no according to Mantel. Trust the postman. Do not get her out of [...]

JD Salinger died two years ago. To date, no new writing has been revealed or released. The literary world seems frustrated, but do we have any right to be?

The Guardian explains how there was a book written about the book, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Isn’t that a prime example of post-modernism? The narrative of the book about the book — How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding — tells a different tale. Written by Harbach’s [...]

There is an interesting blog post from Brain Pickings which alerts me to a book from 1928 called Plotto by dime novelist William Wallace Cook, who attempted to list all possible book narratives and came up with 1,462. The book is back in the blogosphere because it has just been republished by Tin House, who [...]

Dave Eggers, author of the most excellent Zeitoun and founder of McSweeney’s, is publishing a short story on a shower curtain. No, it’s not a reworking of Psycho by Robert Bloch. The ‘publisher’ is The Thing, a quarterly that issues objects that are art-related or literary. The story curtain costs $65 – it better be [...]

Maybe it’s because I’m hopelessly monolingual and firmly entrenched in an Anglophone sea (2,272 to Mexico and 4,354km to Quebec) that I find the notion of an untranslatable word so fun, I love that even with the English language’s bloated word count there are some things better said in the native tongue. So far my [...]

Right up there for awards you probably don’t want to win as a writer, the Bad Sex Awards are given to the author who produces the most awkward, uncomfortable, and cringe worthy sex scene. The shortlist for this year’s awards have been announced and include Sebastian Barry, David Guterson, Jean Auel, Haruki Murakami, Dori Ostermiller, [...]

A group of people unhappy with the Man Booker Prize are launching a new book award called the Literature Prize. Man Booker administrator Ion Trewin has described the need for something better than the Booker as “tosh” and a few toys are flying out the pram. The BBC has the story as the Booker ceremony [...]

Never has the power of literature been better demonstrated than with Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery. The New Yorker magazine printed the story in June 1948 and were stunned by the response. Readers cancelled their subscriptions and hate mail poured in. Today, this story is taught in schools and Jackson’s work is highly influential. [...]

Last night I started reading something off the top of my ‘to read’ list – The World 1950-2000 by Jan Morris – and this morning I see Bookslut has a feature about her work as a travel writer but also a historian. Morris is my favorite travel writer and this collection of her writing is [...]