After months of warning, Larry McMurtry’s Last Book sale is finally under way in Archer City, Texas. The novelist and famed used-book seller is offloading two-thirds of the inventory from his world-renowned bookstore, Booked Up. Even though McMurtry is shedding 300,000 titles, he’s made clear that he has no plans to close the store entirely.
Former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter has landed a book deal to expand upon her much-discussed essay in The Atlantic about the difficulties women face in balancing their domestic and professional lives. "Why Women Still Can't Have It All” was the cover story of the July/August issue and attracted over a million readers online.
In this week’s New Yorker, Jack Hitt reports on “forensic linguistics,” or how linguists can solve crimes that the police can’t figure out. The piece is behind a paywall, but on the mag’s Page Turner blog, Hitt talks with editor Sasha Weiss about fighting crime with words, and “how people unconsciously signal who they are through their language.”
“In birding, as in life in general, don’t be like Jonathan Franzen. Don’t let neurosis, self-involvement, and pride inhibit your enthusiasms.” The birdwatching community goes after Jonathan Franzen.
Stocking up on beach reads meant strong gains for book sellers. Publishers Weekly reports that bookstore sales had their strongest month of the year last May, jumping 5.7 percent to $1.09 billion.
Does Gabriel Garcia Marquez actually have dementia, or is he just getting old? The internet went into mourning last week over remarks from Garcia Marquez’s brother that the novelist’s career was likely over due to dementia. But that might not be the case: According to Jaime Abellos, the director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, Gabo is doing just fine. “I saw him in April,” Abellos told the New York Times. “He is a man of 85 with the normal signs of his age.”
