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

When I first heard of the indie publisher ChiZine, I was certain they were Chicago-based—and assumed they had started life as a ‘zine. And yet I never ran into any ChiZine folks in my Chicago perambulations. Then, at a recent conference, I was introduced to the very nice folks behind the imprint and learned they were [...]

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.” This quote in a recent New York Times article (“The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” by Julie Bosman) reminded me of a short story [...]

Pellinore Warthrop, the arrogant, brilliant hero of Rick Yancey’s thrice-starred Monstrumologist series, is in trouble. Snap to, Will Henry, and rescue your master! Or that’s what we would say if this was a story. Unfortunately, it’s a very real tale of art versus commerce, and the only one who might be able to help is [...]

If you haven’t read the Mystery Showcase feature “Desperately Seeking DeSario,” read it right this instant. Don’t do it for me; do it for Joseph P. DeSario, the author of Sanctuary–I novel I fell in love with when I was 15 and read repeatedly until three months ago when I tracked down DeSario and discovered [...]

The next year will bring a torrent of arresting literary memoirs, memoirs by writers about literary parents or husbands or near-relatives. Joyce Carol Oates remembers her late editor husband, Raymond Smith, in A Widow’s Story. Anne Roiphe chronicles her stint as muse to her unstable first husband in a forthcoming memoir. Gail Godwin sheds light [...]

There sure are a lot of pieces about the relationship between books and paper, which makes sense. We need a lot of thinking to make sense of this changing media environment. Much as I had a hard time working up the energy to read yet one more take, I was glad I read Tom Chatfield’s “Do [...]

Much of the media coverage of the suicide of Kevin Morrissey, the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s managing editor, was downright sensationalistic, teasing out allegations that he may have been driven to it by the bullying of his boss, editor Ted Genoways. Now, in Slate, Emily Bazelon’s “Tragedy at the Virginia Quarterly Review” offers a more nuanced and [...]

From the Department of I’m Shocked, Shocked, NPR reports that the NYTRB is mostly by and about white males (“Are ‘The New York Times’ Book Reviews Fair?“). Also on NPR.org (“Books Have Many Futures,” although I couldn’t find audio), Linton Weeks presents this amusing scenario: Other types of books are not only meant to be [...]

In “Before the Flood,” Margaret Atwood describes what made her go back to the dysopian future in “The Year of the Flood” (by Guy Dixon, The Globe and Mail): One of the things people are working on now, and were working on in 2001 when I was actually halfway through Oryx and Crake, is the [...]

It’s been so long since I wrote a Weeklings that this is really a Monthlings–and that’s being charitable. Here are a few of the things I’ve read recently that have lodged in my brain…due to the length of this post, I have introduced subject headings. First Editions Much as I covet first editions, I only [...]