Hail & Farewell: Chinua Achebe
In 2000, via campus mail, I received an invitation to attend a party to celebrate Chinua Achebe’s 70th birthday. I was a student in his “Modern African Fiction” class at… Read more »
Columbia J-School’s new dean greeted by new scandal
Earlier this week, the Columbia University School of Journalism announced a new dean: The distinguished investigative reporter Steve Coll. But the school’s outgoing dean, Nicholas Lemann, is curiously also in the… Read more »
Amazon and the CIA
A report by FCW (“The Business of Federal Technology”) says that “the CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract” with Amazon “worth up to $600 million over 10 years.”… Read more »
In China, prisoners and die-hard party members own piracy
An op-ed in The New York Times by Chinese writer Yu Hua calls attention to the ongoing question of book piracy in China—and asks whether it is really such a… Read more »
A.L. Kennedy on reading and living on trains
A.L. Kennedy contributes here to the Huffington Post’s “Where I Like to Read” series, and her chosen locale is a good one: the train. As she writes, [W]hen the view… Read more »
Who gets what for a book review
Everybody is talking about how much online writers get paid these days, but my favorite post on the topic comes from Slate’s Dan Kois who shares his subjective system for… Read more »
Amazon foe Mark Suchomel leaves indie distributor IPG
As of Wednesday evening, there was still little in the way of explanation for why Mark Suchomel, president of indie distributor Independent Publishers Group (IPG), was leaving his company. Suchomel… Read more »
Enrique Vila-Matas on Lars Iyer’s Spurious
Last year Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas penned a column for the Spanish newspaper El Pais that praised Lars Iyer’s literary manifesto “Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss.” Now… Read more »
B&N earnings fall
As was widely expected, Barnes & Noble posted disappointing financial results in a third-quarter earnings report on Thursday. Sales in the company’s three biggest divisions—retail stores, college stores, and Nook… Read more »
DSK petitions for book to be banned, gets cash instead
For weeks, former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn—better known in France by his initials “DSK”—has attempted to block the publication of Belle et Bête, which was written by a former DSK… Read more »