January 2012
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“Ah, good conversation - there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of...”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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“Each time you happen to me all over again. ”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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“You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive...”
– Edith Wharton, “New Year’s Day” in Old New York
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“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is...”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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Happy Birthday to Edith Wharton, First Lady of...
Today is the 150th Anniversary of Wharton’s birth (that’s 1862, English majors).
She was employed by Scribner’s Magazine to report on World War I, and was one of the few foreigners allowed to travel through France to the front lines.
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, for The Age of Innocence, in 1921.
She is buried in the American Cemetery, in...
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“I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.”
– Henry James, after a request by the Times Literary Supplement to cut three lines from a 5,000 word article (via annadevries)
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Check it out
Your humble ScribnerBooks tumblr-er has a Tumblr:
http://annadevries.tumblr.com/
More reading, writing, publishing, editing, and miscellany. (Star Wars dogs, for example.)
Same great taste, less commercial filling.
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Some of my worst friends are books
“A book is not company. We engage with it, argue with it, carry it around in our pockets and minds, are haunted by memories of it for years. But it doesn’t argue back, doesn’t engage, never inquires how our day has been, gives only what it wishes. Books are selfish. Everything, every word, is on their terms.
That’s what I like about them.”
—Rick Gekoski,...
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Apostrophe Protection Society
Did you know one exists? They are currently standing up for what’s right in the latest grammar debacle that is Waterstones.
(Even our spell check is vociferously protesting that word.)
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The Planet Hoth is a real place
…and it’s in Finse, Norway, where George Lucas and company decamped to film the scenes from The Empire Strikes Back
It’s also the setting for 1222, Anne Holt’s locked-room mystery featuring a quirky cast of characters trapped in a hotel with a killer during a raging blizzard. Unfortunately, no tauntauns make an appearance.
(Any chance we get to link our books with...
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Thinking About Stephen King
“No one is better at prying open the ordinary reality of evil, the way our nightmares emerge from our daily experience, from our fears and our frustrations, our envy and our rage….King, at his best, affects us: by revealing the deepest — and yes, the darkest — aspects of ourselves.”
—David Ulin, a terrific literary critic, casts his eye on King’s...
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Apropos of nothing: Our current internet obsession
Jenny Holzer is an artist who creates huge installations of “truisms” - statements such as “Money Creates Taste” —and projects them onto the side of buildings. Someone has taken this idea and imitated it - as if Jenny Holzer were talking to her kids. The result is book-worthy: http://twitter.com/JennyHolzerMom
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“An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college...”
– From the department of New York Times corrections, December 30th, 2011. Even better, a self described “adolescent with Asperger’s” pointed the mistake out, initially, in the comments. (via elisabethdonnelly)
We applaud the attention to detail here, folks. (As would our author, David Finch.)
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Yelping with Cormac: Chipotle Mexican Grill →
bobbyfinger:
yelpingwithcormac:
SOMA - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a...
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A "goofy" Scandinavian thriller?
“So you see what we have here. There’s no reason to make the doctor be a dwarf or to send snuff dribbling down Geir’s chin. It’s just for the fun of it. Scandinavian thrillers are all the rage now, starting, I guess, with Smilla’s Sense of Snow. It must be spooky in Scandinavia, but Holt, Norway’s best-selling female crime writer and a former minister of justice, has a goofy streak ...
December 2011
18 posts
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5 Books You Can't Download
Because they’re not available as an e-book, and won’t be, for the foreseeable future.
[via]
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6. The Read A Book Guy. “Not one of these movies is as good as reading a book.” On a list of books, by the way, he will say none of the books is as good as books used to be. He also hates Kindles, which he may or may not mention.
from The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet in the Comments Sections of Year-End Lists on NPR.org
We applaud this guy and his own special brand of...
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Shakespeare & Co. owner dies
“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.” -George Whitman
The original “independent bookstore.”
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We love Jeffrey Eugenides' mom
I attended a reading of Toibin’s in Princeton, and when I mentioned that I was going to give the stories to my mother, he warned me not to: too much explicit gay sex, apparently. Well, that’s true about a couple of stories here, but I think my mother could have handled it, if only because she’s a good reader, knows what art is, and would have enjoyed the range of subjects and lives treated...
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Go see this movie
A brilliant movie with career-cementing performances by Charlize Theron and our own Patton Oswalt. (Yes, we’re claiming him.) Scribner saw a special screening several weeks ago (Thanks, Patton!) and can vouch that this is a provocative, unflinching film with terrific performances.
As A.O. Scott says in his rave review,
“Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar...
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Apple, Publishing Houses Face Antitrust Probe →
offonatangent:
I spoke about various ongoing antitrust investigations into agency model pricing on All Things Considered earlier today. Since it was a short segment, there was a ton of stuff that didn’t make it into the broadcast (not to mention, as I said to the producers and to Lynn Neary off-tape, this topic leads to so many different other Amazon and publishing-related issues that have...
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Why Traditional Publishers Matter
“Most of the editors I have worked with over the past thirty-five years have made crucial contributions to the books entrusted to them, and the copy-editors have always, in every case, done exactly the same. They have enriched the books that came into their hands. Can you have good, thoughtful, creative editing and precise, accurate, immaculate copy-editing if you self-publish? And if...
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The People Who Hate Tim Tebow
“Tebow wrecks all that, because he makes blind faith a viable option. His faith in God, his followers’ faith in him — it all defies modernity. This is why people care so much. He is making people wonder if they should try to believe things they don’t actually believe.”
—Chuck Klosterman in Grantland
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“A professional nonpayer of rent paid his deposit, his first and last, a few more months to establish his bona fides, then settled in for a spell of hard luck. It had come to this, he would declare, choking a sob, his mother’s medicine or the rent.
Just this once slid into twice and after a while his mother died again. By then the landlord knew he was in for a porking but too late....
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November 2011
36 posts
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Corey Stoll to read Hemingway's letters at the JFK... →
oldfilmsflicker:
thallydraper:
he better be wearing hemingway’s wig during it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
omg
Excellent.
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“The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.”
—New York Times Book Review, who named 11/22/63 one of the 10 Best Books of 2011
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Happy Birthday Mark Twain
“Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that. That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating. They...
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Ann Beattie's 7 Truths About Writers
5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.
[via Book Bench blog]
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Ann Beattie's 7 Truths About Writers
7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?”
—from the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog to mark the publication of her new book, Mrs. Nixon
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HELLO Mr. Gatsby!
iheartclassics:
We can’t get enough of these photos from the set of Gatsby 3-D!
In the flesh.
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