Recommended reading: this brilliant and thorough profile of Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, complete with a video of Morrison reading from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child.
A Radical Vision
New Bob Dylan Album on the Way
A new Bob Dylan studio album entitled Tempest is slated for a September release. The album coincides with the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s debut, and it will be his 35th studio set.
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The Recuyell Sells
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, the first book published in English, recently sold at auction for almost 2 million dollars.
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Kindle Wins Christmas?
Amazon announced that on Christmas day it sold more Kindle ebooks than regular books (and that the Kindle is not the site’s most popular gift ever). Chadwick Matlin outlines at The Big Money the reasons why the Christmas day surge in ebook sales don’t matter. The New York Times suggests each new version of the Kindle may be getting worse, and separately dubs 2010 the “Year of the Tablet.”
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The NYRB Mantle
The question of who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers passes the torch is a good one. Surely it’s one of the most desirable jobs in all of publishing.
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To Cover or Not To Cover
It seems like we’re always directing you to Shakespeare-related literary curiosities, but that’s just because there are so many of them! Head over to Electric Literature and watch as some of the Bard’s more famous plays get a beautiful new redesign.
“To look worse after a haircut”
Come on, admit it: you wish English speakers had a word for “one who shows up to a funeral for the food.”
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87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston
New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be published next week.
Letter from Scott Turow
Anyone who cares about the financial viability of the book business should read Author’s Guild President Scott Turow’s open letter on the implications of the government’s threatened anti-trust suit against major publishers and Apple over alleged collusion in e-book pricing.