Category: words

Yes, one expert says, what you might suspect is the reason actually is the reason: “It all goes back to Harry Potter.”

Always a mystery. Sure, sure, some of the books were only (we are being sarcastic here) reviewed by daily book critics, not in the New York Times Book Review, but seriously, NYT, WYD?

Aside from Hillary Clinton’s memoir – which sold well for any kind of book, not just a political book – things are kind of grim, maybe because “leveraging a massive publicity platform is one of the few proven methods of selling a lot of books, but the media has become so balkanized that many best-selling authors are ‘celebrities’ invisible to most of the nation: YouTube stars, radio hosts, reality TV contestants.”

Yes, a new film claims he “invented Christmas,” but gets many other things right. “Commercial requirements drove Dickens to audacious innovations. … Dickens was forging a path that the others followed. He showed how the novel could be popular yet daring, capacious yet true to the ordinary pains of one individual’s experience. He proved that you could experiment and still sell books.”

This lovely piece is by a woman who worked as a book wrapper: “In the weeks before Christmas the Chinook was loud and warm and full. Toddlers threw stuffed monkeys from the two-story playhouse in the children’s book section; men in hiking boots and dirty ski jackets bent over topographical maps they’d pulled from tall oak chests containing all the landscapes of the West: every vein, every slope, from the prairie to the Pacific. Shoppers balanced tall stacks of books in their arms, left stacks of books on the wide black counter while they went back for more.”

The Strand, on Union Square in Manhattan, is known for many things, including its book selection. But its consistent place in the world of tote bags might be equally famous – and now it has offered more than 100 designs. Why? “Books and tote bags go together naturally — one is an object to be carried, the other carries it. So it makes sense that Strand customers would gravitate toward the bookstore’s bags. The appeal of a tote, however, goes beyond mere utility.”

Nine of the 13 members of the editorial staff lost their jobs, including all the top editors and all but one of the staff writers.

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo alleges that Emma Cline sold him her computer with spyware installed, which she used to gain access to his email and other private accounts, stealing from drafts of screenplays he was writing for scenes and language in The Girls.  His suit says Cline used the access to “systematically surveil his private email obsessively over a period of years”. Cline’s countersuit acknowledges that she used the spyware to look into Reetz-Laiolo’s alleged infidelity during their relationship, but says she had no access to the software once she sold the computer.

Researchers speculate that evoking strong imagery may make the content of a poem easier to mentally process, and thus make the experience of reading it more enjoyable. Alternately, “readers might pay closer attention to poems that are vivid,” the researchers write.

Searches for the word spiked three times during the past year, two of them after incidents involving Ivanka Trump and the third after the angry speech in which Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) announced his retirement.