Category: words

“Makella Craelius and her business partner, the filmmaker Puppett, founded Queer Books LLC in February of this year with an eye to buying the store. They hired on two other employees and Craelius began working full time at Giovanni’s Room. They’d been in contract talks with [store owner Ed] Hermance up until the week” he announced the closing – without Informing Craelius first.

“The only reliable judge of a novel’s merits, as Martin Amis once declared, is that grim and exacting arbiter, posterity, and, set against the reckonings of the future, present applause is only a little light murmuring heard a long way off.”

“Here is a brief honor roll of bookshops now vanished: the Seven Gables Bookshop; House of Books Ltd.; Scribner’s; the Gotham Book Mart; the Carnegie Book Shop; Dauber & Pine; the Eberstadt Brothers; University Place Book Shop; Ursus Books; House of El Dieff; and Parnassus Books.”

“You need to be confident, very decisive and opinionated, I’m afraid. Authors expect you to have the expertise, experience and instinct to tell them what to do and then they can decide whether they agree with you or not.”

“Among Amazon’s tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author. If customers for some reason persist and buy a Hachette book anyway, Amazon is saying it will take weeks to deliver it.”

So much for instant drone delivery: “The affected books are a mixture of new and old. A just-published memoir, ‘Everybody’s Got Something,’ by the ‘Good Morning America’ anchor Robin Roberts, is taking as long as three weeks to ship, customers were told. So is Stephen Colbert’s ‘America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t.'”

It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it meets in Central Park (where such things are legal).

“[Weiner] doesn’t need the New York Times; she doesn’t respect its literary standards; her readers don’t care about it; and yet she craves its validation. … An obsession with prestige and exclusion haunts her characters and her fictional universe, but as much as they (and Weiner herself) resent all the people they imagine to be looking down on them, they can be dismayingly ready to turn the tables and partake of the same arrogance themselves.”

“In a striking about-face, the New York Public Library has abandoned its much-disputed renovation plan to turn part of its research flagship on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street into a circulating library and instead will refurbish the nearby Mid-Manhattan Library, several library trustees said.”