Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

In the New York Sun, Kate Taylor explores “Why Publishers Don’t Fact-Check Memoirs“: As one person in publishing who asked not to be named said: “You couldn’t get these books out the door, at least not below a $100-a-copy price point, and then nobody would buy them.” In the context of product liability suits, courts [...]

Frankly, I think boys and girls now have too many options for everything: danger, mischief, and…um, stuff.  

Much as I like Colson Whitehead (Apex Hides the Hurt, 2006), I wasn’t even planning to read his essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, let alone link to it. One look at the headline (“I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.“) and I already felt fatigued. Bad enough that New York City [...]

More on the case of Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. On Slate, Blake Eskin asks Why did it take so long for a far-fetched Holocaust memoir to be debunked? Good question. Why did people take her seriously for so long? Raising questions about the authenticity of someone’s Holocaust testimony, however implausible [...]

After a few problematic or outright fake memoirs whose nuances left me somewhat sympathetic to the authors, it’s kind of a relief to come across one that’s simply wrong, any way I look at it. From the New York Times (“Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction,” by Motoko Rich): In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last [...]

More free-book madness. For the next month, you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free–as long as you don’t mind sitting at a computer with a live internet connection. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (Overclocked) gives it a bad review (the interface, not the book). Gaiman responds to that and another charge, as well: I was surprised [...]

Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (“The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB). Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals – up to a point – the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were [...]

I just can’t say enough about the novels of Richard Price. I really enjoyed Charles McGrath’s profile in the New York Times (“Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium“). Talking about his new novel, Lush Life, Price sounds almost as good in person as he is on the page: He added that he originally thought of writing a historical [...]

From the New York Times, a brief note telling us that Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (1997) is not a memoir but a novel. Her story still sounds sad enough. In a statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: "The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my [...]