Melville House Books

“We’ve been the most active player on the consolidation of the book publishing market in the last 10 years.” This is not the most obvious thing to brag about if… Read more »

Welp, Independent Bookstore Day looks a little different this year for everyone—not just for us at the Melville House Bookshop. But that doesn’t make it any less important. While people… Read more »

How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson speaks with Portland, Oregon’s indie stalwarts Emily Powell, owner of Powell’s Books, and Tin House publisher Craig Popelars, about how their businesses have been impacted… Read more »

The battle between the nonprofit Internet Archive and the publishing industry, which has accused the former of digital piracy, took a definitive turn when the publishers filed a copyright infringement… Read more »

We last checked in on Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the greater literary world a little over a year ago. In that story, the mega-talent-agency, Endeavor, had returned the $400 million dollar investment… Read more »

Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson interviews Portland booksellers Katherine Morgan, who works at Powell’s Books and Bookshop.org, and Kevin Sampsell, the small press buyer at Powell’s, and the publisher of… Read more »

It’s been about a month since China passed the wide-ranging and vaguely worded national security law in Hong Kong in an effort to end the pro-democracy protests that have embroiled… Read more »

The Ghost Network Catie Disabato One minute insanely famous pop singer Molly Metropolis is on her way to a major performance in Chicago, and the next, she’s gone, her cell… Read more »

You may know Bluestockings–New York City’s beloved radical bookstore–as a Lower East Side icon of 21 years. You may frequent it as a cafe or community resource center. Or you may… Read more »

How to Sharpen Pencils David Rees Deep in New York’s Hudson River Valley, craftsman David Rees—the world’s number one #2 pencil sharpener—still practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening.… Read more »

As we wrote a good while back, 2019 was to be big year for iconic works making their way into the public domain. But even from that faraway vantage we… Read more »

Becoming Leonardo Mike Lanford In a book unlike anything ever written about the Renaissance genius, Mike Lankford explodes every cliché about Leonardo da Vinci and then reconstructs him based on… Read more »

Among the many devices designed by the 16th-century scientist and gentleman scholar Agostino Ramelli was an ingenious, if essentially useless, machine: a rotating wheel with small shelves for books, allowing… Read more »

In our collective push for a more just and equitable world we must, of course, look to our language for its biases, exclusions, and oppressions. This can take the form… Read more »

After a massive, popular outcry about the indiscriminate and unchecked violence of police officers towards Black people across America seized the attention of the nation earlier this summer, a certain… Read more »

On Monday Simon & Schuster announced Dana Canedy as the new executive vice president and publisher of their namesake imprint to start on July 27. Canedy replaces Jonathan Karp who… Read more »

Mary Trump’s earthshaking new tell-all fittingly titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, despite Donald Trump’s attempts to impede its release, is… Read more »

Ways to Hide in Winter Sarah St. Vincent Deep in Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Mountains, a woman befriends a mysterious newcomer from Uzbekistan, setting in motion this suspenseful, atmospheric, politically charged… Read more »

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 »