Tag Archives: on books

Amazon’s rough Easter

While most of the country was knee-deep in Easter baskets, I was home getting a blog post ready and reading twitter and planning a sortie to purchase Cadbury Creme Eggs…

State by State in the LA Times

“State by State” is an amazing anthology in which 50 contemporary writers take on our 50 states; I write about it in Friday’s LA Times. For the article, I talked…

Favorite author signatures

Today on Jacket Copy you’ll find a whole series of author signatures and the stories behind them. This one is mine, and it’s last. The far-more-luminary contributors are Maud Newton,…

Right, earthquake

It hit while I was working away at my kitchen table. My building, which dates back to the 1920s, is 14 stories tall, with a brick exterior and 18-inch concrete…

Wrestling the backlist

Mark has admitted a penchant for reading the previous work of an author when he’s assigned a review. I think this is a fairly common trait; I can’t imagine any…

Covers judged, in pictures

The American Institute of Graphic Arts has announced the 2007 winners of their 50 books/50 covers competition. These are the best book covers as selected by designers, and include art…

Juding books by their covers at the New Yorker

Let’s say you’re working on a book. Let’s say you’d like for it to be reviewed in the pages of the New Yorker, and not sitting on the free-to-a-good-home book…

Kenneth Turan on reviewing

LA Times film reviewer Kenneth Turan writes about the risk of being wrong in the face of “the tyranny of the masterpiece.” I am kind of amazed by the comments…

How to help a book review

Who knows what the owners of the Chicago Tribune have in mind for the paper’s Book Review. But they’re asking what readers want, and if we read and like it,…