Blog

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...
A Promised Land
The $10 Million Memoir
Why publishers pay enormous advances to celebrities, and why the economics don't always make sense. In the summer of 2009, Sarah Palin had just resigned as governor of Alaska. Her... Read more...
Mary Shelley and the Problem of Playing God
Mary Shelley and the Problem of Playing God
She turned a ghost story into a warning about invention, abandonment and the human urge to create what it cannot control. In the wet summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary... Read more...
Mary Shelley
5 Books That Prove Mary Shelley Is a Visionary of Romantic Horror
Mary Shelley has become so synonymous with Frankenstein that it is easy to forget she was, in every sense, a working writer: a professional who produced historical novels, dystopian fiction, travel... Read more...
The Sound and the Fury
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Sound and the Fury”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a third title: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a novel that makes you work for every page and rewards you for it.... Read more...
5 Books That Prove Gustave Flaubert Is the Master of Modern Realism
5 Books That Prove Gustave Flaubert Is the Master of Modern Realism
Gustave Flaubert had a cruelly precise eye. He saw how easily people confuse desire with destiny, money with happiness, and respectable language with moral substance, and then he built novels... Read more...