January 30, 2014

“If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them” Malcolm Gladwell said to interviewer Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian last September. That’s a fair policy, and a good one to… Read more »

Arts & Culture

Salman Rushdie, Ian Rankin and Joanne Harris amongst those recognised in the Queen’s birthday honours list — Nikki Griffiths
Lost Charlotte Brontë manuscript sold for $1.25 million — Nikki Griffiths
Waterstones appeal aims to raise £1m for Ukraine disaster fund — Tom Clayton
The Big Jubilee Read: 70 books are selected to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 70 year reign — Nikki Griffiths

Poetry vs. prose debate solved in Russia—with a knife

Martin Rouse

Last week in the land of Dostoyevsky and vodka, an enduring debate reopened when a 67-year-old man asserted his belief that “the only real literature is prose.” Unfortunately for him,… Read more »

Strange Victories: Grove Press archives on display

Sal Robinson

Two years after the death of its legendary publisher Barney Rosset (who our publisher Dennis Johnson eulogized here on MobyLives), the archives of Grove Press have been opened up to… Read more »

Tweeting Beowulf

Julia Fleischaker

Welsh medievalist Elaine Treharne describes her blog, Text Technologies, as “Thoughts on the textual and literary, & on text technologies from Babylonian cuneiform to Twitter, with an eye on the… Read more »

Seth MacFarlane to write Family Guy: the novel

Andrew McGrath

That Seth MacFarlane would make another film after 2012’s dreadful but extremely lucrative Ted didn’t come as a surprise. The surprise was the recent announcement that MacFarlane, who has written mostly… Read more »

Melville House Books

Cruel and asinine punishment: Malcolm Gladwell book assigned to eco-arsonist by a federal judge

Dustin Kurtz