Is Bill Gates the new Oprah? (No, of course not.)
Bill Gates can add another accolade to his list—the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft is also a book critic. Katherine Rosman at The New York Times reports that Gates has garnered… Read more »
Egypt continues crackdown on novelist Alaa Al Aswany
Earlier this year, MobyLives wrote about Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s efforts to purge mosque libraries of “any book, irrespective of its author or publishing house, that contradicts the teachings of… Read more »
Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter organizes four-day marathon reading of War and Peace
In Russia, yesterday marked the first day of what will be a week-long marathon reading of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Coordinated by Fekla Tolstaya, Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the event seeks to finish reading… Read more »
Morrissey committed the worst writely sin—now, he’s won the Bad Sex in Fiction award
Morrissey’s debut novel finds itself in good company this week—according the BBC, the Smiths frontman joins Ben Okri, Norman Mailer, Sebastian Faulks, and John Updike as the most recent winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction prize.… Read more »
FSG publishing anonymously authored Silicon Valley satire—all 18 pages of it
In June of this year, MobyLives wrote about Iterating Grace, a 2,001 word chapbook making fun of, while making its way around, Silicon Valley. Now, according to Alexandra Alter at The… Read more »
In Paris, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast becomes emblem of defiance
Along with the flowers and candles placed at the sites of last Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, mourners are also leaving copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Bookstores are moving lots of… Read more »
First Shelley, now Brontë: Yet another 19th century writer to publish new work
It’s been a fruitful month for academic sleuths—Oxford acquired a long lost political poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an upcoming catalog of Francis Bacon features over one-hundred never-before-seen paintings, including one discovered… Read more »
Jonathan Safran Foer finally sells extremely expensive and incredibly located apartment—to ex-wife Nicole Krauss
Today, in news that’s not at all indicative of the reality of being a writer, author Nicole Krauss has bought out her ex, fellow writer and boyfriend-to-Michelle-Williams Jonathan Safran Foer,… Read more »
New “experimental” bookstore for Millennials to open in London
U.K. tech entrepreneurs Rohan Silva and Sam Aldenton are opening a bookstore on Hanbury Street in London, reports The Bookseller’s Lisa Campbell. The founders of Second Home, a “utopian workspace” for startups such… Read more »
Jeb Bush 730-page email collection: The death knell for ebooks?
Last week, in an attempt to troubleshoot his flagging campaign for president, Jeb Bush added another title to the myriad of marketing tools books by presidential candidates: an ebook titled… Read more »