SLIDESHOW: “Books are Weapons”
Formed by an executive order of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, the Works Progress Administration was a signature initiative of the New Deal and the most ambitious employment project in… Read more »
The Bard and the Beatles
Over the years, an impressive array of the world’s greatest talents has performed the works of Shakespeare on stage and screen. Think Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard… Read more »
FRIDAY SOMETHING-OR-OTHER-TO-DO-WITH-BOOKS MUSIC VIDEO: Elvis Costello
Bob Dylan aside, few rockers are praised for the literary quality of their songwriting more than Declan MacManus, a.k.a. Napoleon Dynamite, a.k.a. The Right Reverend Jimmy Quickly, a.k.a. Elvis Costello.… Read more »
Lance Armstrong gets reshelved
It’s time to call his lies out for what they are… Read more »
Hush Hush: the mixtape
Read, then put your headphones on and enjoy… Read more »
SLIDESHOW: Writers in underpants
On a recent afternoon, in the middle of some research for an upcoming book, I fell down a Google rabbit hole and landed on a Polish blog post with the… 1 / Read more »
Eating your way through the classics with Fictitious Dishes
This week Melville House celebrates the latest release in our series of Pepe Carvalho mysteries from Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. In Off Side, the pressure is on Carvalho to find… Read more »
Notes on design: Fifty shades of imitation
Every once in a while, a book cover comes along which is so striking and iconic it immediately realigns its entire genre. Before Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight hit the bestseller lists a… Read more »
Burning books to save a library?
This week, the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival honors the most creative work in the ad industry, and one of the biggest winners is a campaign to save a small… 1 / Read more »
Art installation commemorates slain journalists
Among the books I’ve been most humbled to contribute to in some small way, our collection of essays by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?, is surely… Read more »