Alex Shephard

Alex Shephard is the director of digital media for Melville House, and a former bookseller.

Guy who people thought was Thomas Pynchon in P.T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice: “I am not Thomas Pynchon and also Thomas Pynchon was not in Inherent Vice.”

Inherent Vice was probably the movie we spent the most time discussing in our office last year (in part because it came out while we were pulling all nighters putting together The… Read more »

The End of the Tour has a trailer and Jason Segel looks silly in it

I am very excited about the upcoming David Foster Wallace not-quite-a-biopic The End of the Tour, a movie about a Rolling Stone writer trying to make sense of the American author. I’m not… Read more »

Negotiations between Amazon and Penguin Random House UK are getting tense

Last year during BEA, the ongoing, increasingly bitter dispute between Amazon and Hachette was the talk of the conference—that is, when people had time to talk between stuffing suitcases and… Read more »

Osama bin Laden liked the same books as your Uncle Jeff

Yesterday, the United States Government declassified a trove of documents acquired by Navy SEALS uring their raid of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. According to CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani was long-planned… Read more »

Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins Man Booker International Prize

On Tuesday, the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Krasznahorkai is the author of a seven novels, four of which—Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, and Seibo Down Below—are available… Read more »

This Week in Karl Knausgaard

Kim Kardashian is the American Karl Ove Knausgaard: Whatever you might think of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and whatever you think of Kim Kardashian, and whatever you have ever thought of Hitler’s… Read more »

Charlie Hebdo editors receive standing ovation, freedom of expression award at PEN Gala

On Tuesday, Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Gerard Biard accepted the PEN American Center’s Toni and James C Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award in a ceremony held at New York’s Natural History Museum. Charlie… Read more »

DUMBO’s P.S. Bookshop in danger of closing

Earlier this week, I was strolling around DUMBO, the unfortunately named neighborhood where Melville House’s U.S. offices reside, when I noticed this flyer on the window of a business on… Read more »

I am writing on MobyLives about Jeffrey Eugenides writing in the New York Times Book Review about Karl Knausgaard writing about him in the New York Times Magazine

“’The last time I was in New York,’ Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine, in his account of traveling through the United States, ‘a well-known… Read more »

Introducing #FreeBookFriday

Inspired by #FreeArtFriday and Books on the Metro, we’re introducing #FreeBookFriday today, a celebration of books, free things, and hashtags in New York City (and perhaps, later, beyond—but just not… Read more »