Melville House Books

Fiction

• 50 annotated first editions—going to the highest bidder

  It’s an impressive feat to collect 50 first editions of some of the most eminent authors writing today. But it’s a rare event when each of those fifty books has… Read more »

• Put Down Old People at Birth, and other writings discovered in the Scarfolk archive

  Anyone who, like me, grew up in the North West of England will tell you that a childhood spent in Northern suburbia was a spooky one: eerie, identical streets, weird… Read more »

• The White Review announces Short Story Prize shortlist

  The shortlist for the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize was announced earlier this week. The competition, which opened for submissions in December, will award the prize to a writer… Read more »

• Kurt Vonnegut: A short lecture on short stories

  For some reason he wasn’t quite famous for it, but the late, great Kurt Vonnegut used to give lots of public lectures. Later in life they were crankier, more prescriptive,… Read more »

• BISACS I have wanted

  Anyone who’s ever had to assign a BISAC subject heading to a book and wondered if the book in question actually fits under “FICTION/Psychological” has probably been tempted to come… Read more »

• Porn and the classics

  And now for an important round-up of erotica, the driving force of the literary industry since the E.L. James spring of 2012, when publishers of all other types of literature… Read more »

• An unwritten masterpiece

  MobyLives recently reported on the new espionage in literature: Amazon and other ebook-sellers harvesting information about our reading habits and passing it to publishers, some of whom use it to… Read more »

• Biographer writes short story in tribute to Ray Bradbury

  Ray Bradbury biographer Sam Weller writes on his blog that a new short story, “The Shadows Behind the Trees” (PDF here) is a tribute to his friend and mentor. About… Read more »

• The Education of a Young Magician: Ray Bradbury recalls the visit to the circus that changed his life

  The problem with death, Ray Bradbury once said to me, is that “it is so damned permanent.” Bradbury, who died Tuesday at 91, was a legend of sci-fi and a… 2 / Read more »

• The future of literature: in the hands of the obsessive, maniacal, disturbed

  Fellow book lovers: word is, the party’s over. Last year, Lars Iyer—Blanchot scholar, philosophy lecturer, and author of the self-evisceratingly hilarious novels Spurious and Dogma—asked: what do we do after the end… 1 / Read more »