Once a week, publishing reporter Andrea Sachs will recap the most interesting news in book publishing.
IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME
A high-school classics teacher sends a manuscript of her first novel to an agent in Manhattan, …
Books
My Five Things: Wicked Novelist Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and the new Out of Oz, picks the five things he’s really enjoying right now.
It Sucked to Go Through World War II. Inferno Will Remind You Why.
There’s no point in trying to summarize Inferno, because it’s a book written against summaries. It’s an anti-summary.
TIME Recommends: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights
In her new memoir, Didion writes about how magical thinking no longer seemed possible following the loss of her daughter.
Mark Whitaker Takes A Long Trip Home
In his new memoir, a CNN editor turns his reporting skills on his own family.
How 11/22/63 Fits Into Stephen King’s Ever-Expanding Universe
At one point in 11/22/63, Stephen King’s new novel about a man who travels back in time to try to stop the JFK assassination, the main character Jake Epping crosses paths with a pair of characters from his 1986 book It. I mention this in my review of the novel in this week’s issue of TIME, on stands this weekend.
Amazon Makes Like a Publisher With Kindle Singles
Correction appended: November 9, 2011
In January, Amazon.com, the world’s largest online bookseller, launched its Kindle Singles sales campaign. The mini-eBooks were specifically designed for the company’s popular eReader …
The Recipe Project Will Make You Hungry For Music
Every once in a while you come across a project and think, I can’t believe no one has done this before. That’s how I felt when I heard about The Recipe Project, a cookbook that takes recipes from established chefs like David …
In Stephen King’s Latest, Trying to Stop Lee Harvey Oswald
I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read The Long Walk, one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read The Dark Half, which taught me a word I have …
I Want My MTV: Drugs and Money and Cows in Boardrooms
An alternative title for I Want My MTV: The Uncensored History of the Music Video Revolution could be Drugs and Money. As we learn in Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s splendid oral history, music video production fueled a …
The Perils of Reading About Pauline Kael
After reading Brian Kellow’s biography, I still adore film critic Pauline Kael. But I’m glad I didn’t know her.
IQ84: A Murakami Novel Sans Murakami
Haruki Murakami may be the world’s most popular working literary author. And there is absolutely no logical reason for this.
He’s not an especially nimble writer, and you’d be hard-pressed to pick out a passage of his work …
Steve Jobs and Joan Didion: The Untold Story
There isn’t actually an untold Jobs/Didion story. I just wanted you to read this.
Jobs did go out with Joan Baez though, when he was 27 and she was 41. In his new biography Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson tells an incredible story about them. Jobs (who was already massively wealthy) kept telling Baez (who wasn’t) about this amazing red dress
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