Barnes & Noble plans to launch four “concept stores” featuring upgraded cafes, with proper food and, more importantly, beer and wine. Good place to get slowly plastered while contemplating the future of the book business!
You likely remember Judy Blume paperbacks as well-worn treasures plucked from the middle school library, brightly colored, with a cover illustration of a teenage girl with ’70s hair and a bad sweater. And the character of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, definitely did not have an iPhone with which to summon her…
Lois Duncan, the beloved young adult author* who wrote as many as 48 books and spent the last 30 years searching for the true killer of her youngest daughter, died this week at home in Florida. She was 82.
According to this video from a woman whose name I believe is “Erica in the House,” the latest trend in photo-documentation isn’t merely the highly-contentious selfie, but a far more intimate peek inside someone’s soul: behold “The Shelfie.”
The sixteen-novel Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers is at least as influential a text in the annals of latter-day prophecy belief as the Book of Revelation. Which, of course, happens to furnish source material for the series’ intensively literalist accounting of the rapture, the tribulation, and the final…
Lives don’t actually have coherent, linear story arcs, but if I had to retroactively tease one essential narrative out of mine, it’d be my transformation from a terror‐stricken mouse‐person to an unflappable human vuvuzela.
This spring and summer marks the release of two biographies on former Cosmopolitan editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl Helen Gurley Brown. They are not the first biographies written about Brown—Jennifer Scanlon received that distinction when she published Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley…
Abbi Jacobson, the half of Broad City responsible for the show’s titles, interstitials, and most iconic blue bandage dress, is publishing her third book this fall. Her first release not meant to be colored in, Carry This Book imagines the objects found in the bags of famous people like Oprah, Michelle Obama, and…
Speculation abounds that Beyoncé’s Lemonade opus is about a cheating Jay Z, and part of it is because Jay Z has built quite the rumored reputation for that over the years. One person who has spoken directly to that is Carmen Bryan, ex-girlfriend of Nas and supposed catalyst for the legendary Jay/Nas beef that…
Last night’s Game of Thrones begins with the sightless gaze of Jon Snow, right where we left him last year. But the most striking moments of the episode—including its final shocker—involve the gazes of women, usually without any words at all. There weren’t any dragons or zombies, and only a couple glimpses of a…
Asia McClain, famous for being a crucial alibi witness in Adnan Syed’s murder trial, is writing a book based on her involvement in the case.
Prior to this week, Lauren Conrad was a published author perhaps best known in that sphere for her likely ghostwritten chick lit beach reads, or the boringly titled Lauren Conrad Beauty and Lauren Conrad Style. But her new book Celebrate seems to mark her real coming-out as the face of a legitimate lifestyle brand—one…
Julia Ward Howe is likely best known for penning Battle Hymn of the Republic. Hastily written in a Washington, DC hotel room during the early days of the Civil War, Howe’s patriotic lyrics became synonymous with the march of American soldiers. “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” Howe wrote,…
Divergent and its sequels don’t make a whole lot of sense—but what they do have is a blend of wish-fulfillment, anarchic WTFery and actual social commentary that amounts to the Platonic ideal of “dystopia as cotton candy.” You will be in a sugar coma at the end of this film, but the sacrifice of your brain may not be…
Ever since so-called Ferrante fever struck, there’s been a cottage industry dedicated to unraveling the true identity of the pseudonymous Italian novelist. “Who is Elena Ferrante?” is a question that understandably haunts fans of the novelist and her complex rendering of her female protagonists. And yet, Ferrante…
All this week, J.K. Rowling has been publishing History of Magic in North America, one part a day for four days. When it’s been at its best, it’s been sloppy; when its not at its best—which is most of the time—it’s uninformed and under-researched. At its worst, it is downright offensive, and here’s why.
It’s been over 20 years since Xena: Warrior Princess first came to our screens, but the love of Xena (and Gabrielle) burns as bright as ever. Now Xena’s coming back, in a big way. We asked Javier Grillo-Marxuach, showrunner of the new Xena TV show, and Genevieve Valentine, writer of the new Xena comic book, to…
Deadline is reporting something that seems both completely inevitable and totally impossible: Jill Soloway is directing and executive producing a half-hour pilot based on I Love Dick, Chris Kraus’s canonically experimental memoir-fiction hybrid, which was published by Semiotext(e) in 1997.
On this day 50 years ago, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was released. It would take a month before the book would make it to the New York Times Bestseller list, but once it got there it would remain there for a record-breaking 65 weeks, breaking to number 1 in May. A year later, a movie based on the book was…
Is it possible that a bookstore clerk once dreadfully wronged Jeff Bezos? Because a rumor that Amazon might open more IRL, brick-and-mortar bookstores threw everyone into such a tizzy that it seems worth asking whether this has been some Count of Monte Cristo situation all along.
