Melville House Books

David Foster Wallace

• David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech video

  David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address begins: (If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while… Read more »

• Timothy Leary’s Nintendo Power Glove and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s old socks

  Turns out research libraries are collecting all kinds of things these days… Read more »

• Pinch Pulitzer goes to David Foster Wallace

  When the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to present an award for fiction last month, independent bookstores were frustrated at the lack of a winner, which would usually give them… Read more »

• The Pulitzer Prize, take two

  Since the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to present an award for fiction in 2011 last month, the New York Times invited eight literary experts to pick their winners for the… Read more »

• When it comes to “complete” collections, when does more add up to less?

  The issue of manipulating the unpublished work of dead writers has reared its head again — MobyLives last week noted the addition of scenes in the paperback release of David… Read more »

• David Foster Wallace’s Pale King paperback to include additional scenes … leaving some fans who bought the hardcover unhappy

  As publishers, we here at Melville House are often in the position of trying to figure out how to revive interest in an old book that we think worthy of… 2 / Read more »

• The future of novel-writing, as seen in the past

  Get ready for a sort of rarity: The big publishing machine in New York doing what it usually does — a mega-rollout featuring the usual power-broker suspects — except this… Read more »

• Indie publisher James Atlas is indie no longer, or, Now Nancy Pearl has a friend!

  Biographer and editor James Atlas, who has acquired books for HarperCollins, Penguin, and WW Norton and later published an independent list at Atlas & Co., has teamed up with Amazon… Read more »

• Are we too stupid to read Dickens?

  We’re familiar with the argument: the modern age is bankrupting our attention spans, we are all technology-addled morons clicking semi-consciously between browser screens, unable to complete the simplest of tasks:… 3 / Read more »

• The suicide author: David Foster Wallace & Édouard Levé

  “I wish I could still subscribe to the Death of the Author theories I glommed onto so readily in college,” writes Ryan Chapman at his blog Chapman/Chapman, but the author’s… Read more »