Melville House Books

Propaganda

• In Texas, you can make history … by changing it

  According to a New York Times journalist, America’s school children have been reading textbooks catering mostly to Texan sensibilities for decades. Gail Collins in the New York Review of Books… Read more »

• THE HOLLYWOOD ECONOMIST: Hollywood, SOPA, and the Pirates of the Internet

  A “2.0 edition” of Edward Jay Epstein’s The Hollywood Economist releases on January 24th. Below Epstein discusses why Hollywood is so intent on passing something like SOPA legislation. * * *… 2 / Read more »

• Mexican presidential hopeful not exactly a book guy …

  In a story reminiscent of George W. Bush’s mental pyrotechnics, Enrique Peña Nieto, the front-runner in Mexico’s Presidential race “stumbled in a high-profile way at a world-class book festival over… 2 / Read more »

• George Orwell and the long fight for readable government documents

  “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay ”Politics and the English Language”—a famous attack on the obscurity and inanity… Read more »

• Untranslatable words

  The Big Think recently published this great list of untranslatable words related to relationships. Our favourites: Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it… Read more »

• Bye bye, Talisman Terry

  Sorry, kids. Your new favorite coloring book, Talisman Terry’s Energy Adventure, is no more. Thanks to Stephen Colbert, Talisman Terry will not be joining the ranks of corporate cartoon shills… Read more »

• READ

  It was windswept and wet at The Brooklyn Book Festival, but that didn’t stop the crowds from showing up en masse. People huddled beneath the tents, wiped water from the… Read more »

• The stigma of reading alone

  We don’t link to New York Times stories too often, mostly because everyone else does, and we’re looking for a different (smarter) perspective. But this gem by Austin Considine that… Read more »

• "Burn the nasties," says Islamic spokesman of books endorsing Bin Laden . . .

  An Australian Associated Press wire story notes a newspaper investigation that found a number of Islamic bookstores and associations in Sydney selling “books endorsing Osama Bin Laden and discussing the… Read more »

• Book suggests stores boycott of Left Behind series . . .

  A new book about the phenomenally popular Left Behind book series suggests bookstores drop support of the book, according to a PW Daily report by Steven Zeitchik. The book, Skipping… Read more »