For those of you who missed BookExpo America (or who were there but fear you missed something), Publisher’s Weekly has rounded up the 2014 convention’s big books.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad wonders if Seymour Hirsh aided Syria with “unprofessional journalism.”
If you’re in New York tonight, the Housing Works bookstore is hosting what promises to be an interesting roundtable, organized by VIDA, on literary biography. Participants include Jill Lepore (author of Jane Franklin), Rebecca Mead (who has written about George Eliot and Middlemarch), Ruth Franklin (who is working on a biography of Shirley Jackson), and Salamishah Tillet (Nina Simone). Poet and biographer Diane Mehta moderates.
Vice Magazine lashes out at Gawker’s “garbage click-bait journalism,” which includes a recent “inaccurate and irresponsible story about VICE’s workplace.”
If you haven’t exhausted yourself with stories about Amazon’s fight with Hachette, here’s a quick tour of the latest batch: Amazon might be delaying its delivery of Hachette titles because the Internet retailer needs money, or maybe Amazon just “doesn’t care.” Michael Pietsch, famous for his acquisition of Infinite Jest and now chief executive of Hachette, is leading his company and other publishers in the fight against Amazon, and author James Patterson attacked Amazon’s practices at a Book Expo America appearance. Writer Jack Shafer announces that he’s quitting Amazon, Huff Post says it’s almost impossible to ditch Amazon, and Bob Kohn explains how publishers “can beat Amazon.”