Melville House Books

It’s been terrifying to study the hockey stick-shaped graphs of Covid-19 spikes in places like Arizona and Texas, states that had closed-down insufficiently and have now re-opened too early. Unfortunately, this has… Read more »

The 2010s were a watershed decade for representation. Diversity in all forms of media came to the fore as a major issue, riding on a groundswell of people pushing for… Read more »

  Strange Stars Jason Heller As the 1960s drew to a close, and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom. Derided… Read more »

On June 19, 2020—better known, this year, as Juneteenth—the Associated Press formally ruled that the word “Black,” when used in “a racial, ethnic or cultural sense,” must be capitalized. In… Read more »

Way back at the end of January, we wrote a little ditty about the new kids on the online retail block, Bookshop.org. Back then they were taking it step by step,… Read more »

Librarians, they’re just like us! Well, if you are someone who would steal $8 million of rare books and artifacts from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, that is. Michael Levenson… Read more »

Is that? Do I hear? Is that the sound of good news? Well, not quite. Here’s where we’re at. As reported in Publishers Weekly, the Department of Justice motioned for… Read more »

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, author of the international hit 2001 novel The Shadow of the Wind, has passed away at the age of 55. Often critically lauded as the next great… Read more »

As promised, we have a batch of novellas on sale for $1.99 this week. From classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s May Day to cult favorites like Christopher Morley’s The Haunted… Read more »

In this amazing video of James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley, in a room that attempts to set a new land record for fustiness, Baldwin offers a profound kind of… Read more »

The divisions and dissension that have rocked the publishing world over the last two weeks have spread even unto the normally staid world of book reviewers. When a dispute over… Read more »

California and Washington state representatives have entered an ongoing investigation of questionable business practices used by Amazon alongside the European Union and federal investigators. Amazon is currently under scrutiny for… Read more »

Authoritarian Nightmare John Dean and Bob Altemeyer A piercing look at how someone like Donald Trump and his followers achieved power—and what they might do to keep it. AVAILABLE 8/25/2020… Read more »

This week we have another selection of ebooks from the Last Interview series on sale for $1.99—as well as one of our favorite genre-hopping adventures, The Mirror Thief, on sale for… Read more »

The mysterious anonymous author who goes by the pen name Elena Ferrante has released a new novel in Europe, an event that has been greeted with long lines at recently… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson interviews two of the leading lights in Canada’s indie book scene, Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House Books, and Kyle Buckley, the manager of… Read more »

Another week, another ebook sale! We have a fantastic selection of novellas for $1.99 this week—as well as a special sale on Malcolm Harris’s Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit. Smart,… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson interviews the braintrust behind Shelf Awareness, the beloved trade publication covering independent bookselling. Included are Jenn Risko, the co-founder and publisher; John Mutter, the co-founder… Read more »

On Monday, a group of publishers sued the nonprofit Internet Archive, claiming that the group’s distribution of free e-books violated the terms of copyright and amounted to digital piracy. According… Read more »

Melville House resolutely stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and condemns police violence against black people. And while we in fact deplore violence of any kind, including the looting… Read more »

We have a great selection of Last Interview ebooks on sale this week. Each volume contains the subject’s last interview, as well as a handful of the most interesting interviews… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson interviews Rick Simonson, head buyer at Elliott Bay Book Company, and Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa Editions. This is the fourth in a series of… Read more »

It was announced Wednesday that legendary AIDS activist and author Larry Kramer has died of pneumonia at the age of 84. In the early 1980s, Kramer helped found the Gay Men’s… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson interviews Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham, owners of Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC. This is the third in a series of interviews with our… Read more »