Category: words

“If I don’t like the cover, I won’t photograph it and put it on my feed,” says Femke Brull, a “bookstagramer” who runs @booksfemme. While she won’t avoid promoting a loved, if less-attractive book, she opts for a snap of the title page instead – even if it is less memorable than a beautifully covered counterpart. And she will “pay extra” for what she considers a better-looking edition.

Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.

The question has become an active issue in the University of California system: employees at UCal’s 100 libraries are pushing to have a clause guaranteeing academic freedom included in the new contract they’re negotiating. The librarians thought the idea was “a no-brainer” and including it in the contract a mere formality, but UCal administrators maintain that the doctrine of academic freedom doesn’t apply to non-teaching staff.

The 47 names put forward were opened up to a public vote, with an expert jury, chaired by editor and independent publisher Ann Pålsson, set to consider the final four authors before announcing a winner in October.

Many romance novels actually function as more than “imaginative opposition,” providing a very real space for enjoyment and relaxation, which might be otherwise missing from readers’ lives. The best romances can do this without lulling readers into a false sense of complacency.

The Fall of Gondolin, though the last of Tolkien’s books to be published, was written early in his career, while he was recovering from the Battle of the Somme in 1917; it depicts an early stage in the history of Middle-earth, providing background for the tales that made Tolkien world-famous.

Just hours before the July 4 holiday, the troubled bookstore chain terminated CEO Demos Parneros for cause, though the precise offense was not revealed publicly. In his complaint, Parneros charges that the company fired him baselessly after his relationship with chairman Len Riggio deteriorated – and let the public assume that Parneros was dismissed for sexual harassment. In response, B&N said that the suit is “nothing but an attempt to extort money from the Company by a CEO who was terminated for sexual harassment, bullying behavior and other violations of company policies.”

The arrests in July of a Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh archivist and a dealer on charges of stealing and selling $8 million worth of items from the library’s collections “sent a shudder across the rare books industry, a multimillion-dollar business in the United States … In this niche world based on trust, where confidants are currency and handshake deals are commonplace, the arrest of a prominent dealer is a shocking suggestion of deceit.”