Barnes and Noble announced a fourteen-million-dollar loss for its most recent quarter, with sales dropping 6.6 percent. The troubled company is searching for a new CEO as Amazon continues to chip away at their business. In an attempt to lure customers back into the bookstore, B&N will be opening four new trial stores this fall that will have a restaurant serving food, beer, and wine. The first, set to open in Eastchester, New York this October is also planning to have a fire pit and bocce court.
The public libraries of Washington, DC will be hiding once-banned books throughout the city. Free copies of titles such as Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, and Slaughterhouse Five can be found at local businesses by following clues on social media.
Author Alan Moore throws the New York Times’s “By the Book” column for a loop by not having a nightstand, a favorite genre, or a system for organizing his books. When asked which still-working writers he admires, Moore said the question made him uncomfortable: “In anything other than a stark and unqualified list that unreels to the end of our allotted space here, there are going to be serious, gaping omissions that will cause me to wake at 3 in the morning and groan in useless torment at my own inadequacy as both a friend and reader.” Moore also announced his retirement from comic books at a press conference yesterday: “I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground.”
New York magazine editor Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 biography of Roger Ailes detailed some of the same allegations of sexual harassment that caused the Fox News president to resign this summer. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Sherman talks about why the accusations have finally stuck: “This is all playing out in a post-Cosby culture, where women are more likely to be believed when they make allegations against a powerful man.”
An exhibition of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, manuscripts, and personal items goes on display today at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. In addition to parts of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, the show will also include the only two portraits made of the author during her lifetime, on loan from London’s National Portrait Gallery. The exhibit will be open through early next year.
Tomorrow, Emily Books publishers Emily Gould and Ruth Curry will hold a panel discussion about women’s writing. The two spoke with LitHub about the myth of “women’s fiction” and the late writers they would invite to the panel if they could: “Cookie Mueller, Ellen Willis, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Comyns . . . Maybe next year!”