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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with an eighth title: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel still fought over in school board meetings more than a century after it... Read more...
Borders
Borders Had Everything Except a Future
How one of America's great bookstore chains handed its online business to the company that would help destroy it In September 2011, the last Borders bookstores in America went dark.... Read more...
The Waste Land Lord: T. S. Eliot and the Business of Being Difficult
The Waste Land Lord: T. S. Eliot and the Business of Being Difficult
He made modern confusion sound formally inevitable, then turned cultural anxiety into a permanent publishing industry. In 1921, exhausted and unwell, T. S. Eliot went to Margate on the English... Read more...
The Great Gatsby
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Great Gatsby”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a seventh title: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel that flopped on arrival and became essential decades later. Lights on across a... Read more...
Amazon Shop
The Amazon Problem: Too Big to Ignore, Too Powerful to Trust
How the company that made books easier to sell became the company publishers are afraid to lose In 2022, the Independent Book Publishers Association started hearing a troubling story on... Read more...
John Coltrane
Giant Steps: John Coltrane and the Discipline of Going Further
He turned the saxophone into a form of inquiry, then kept asking questions long after the audience had lost sight of the map. On December 9th 1964, John Coltrane entered... Read more...
1984
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “1984”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a sixth title: George Orwell’s 1984, a novel so influential its vocabulary escaped the book entirely. Winston Smith sits at a desk in the... Read more...
Jack of All Trades
Jack of One Trade, Master of None Else
We have gotten remarkably good at narrow things and, in the process, quietly forgotten how to be wide ones. Years ago I came across a passage in The Making of... Read more...
The Martian
The Self-Publishing Wild West
How Kindle Direct Publishing destroyed the old gatekeepers and created a new problem: millions of books competing for attention In 2011, a software engineer named Andy Weir uploaded a novel... Read more...
Ulysses
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Ulysses”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a fifth title: James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that turns one ordinary day into one of the biggest books in the language. Every June... Read more...
Amazon Hatchette
When Amazon Went to War With Hachette
How a fight over book prices revealed who really had the power in publishing In the spring of 2014, something strange began happening to books published by Hachette. They were... Read more...
The Waste Land
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Waste Land”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a fourth title, and its first poem: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, still the most argued-over poem of the twentieth century. A crowd flows... Read more...