David Mitchell has a new novel, The Bone Clocks, coming out this September, and has reportedly signed a three-book deal with Random House. The new novel is another decade-spanning, genre-hopping epic, clocking in at about 700 pages.
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s riveting New York Times Magazine essay on two mysterious prewar blues singers artfully integrates audio, video, and pictures—a rare example of the Web’s bells and whistles actually working to draw out the complexities of a literary story.
This weekend, the LA Times announced the winners of its Book Prize.
The New York Times profiles the survival (and rise) of bookstores in Seattle, reporting that the great Eliott Bay Book Company has made a “substantial profit” for the first time in twenty years, with the store’s employees saying that many of their customers work at the nearby Amazon headquarters. But despite the cheerful headline, the article really only points to Eliott Bay, long a local stalwart (along with a couple other shops), as evidence that the indie-book culture in the city is thriving. We hope that, as the American Booksellers Association says, “Seattle has become one of the most successful independent bookstore cities in the country,” but on the strength of the article, we’re just going to have to take their word for it.
At the New Statesman, Alex Clark argues that social media will enrich the novel, not threaten it.
Jenny Diski remembers Doris Lessing: “My having lived with Doris and her implacable understanding of what it is to be a writer has made it easier for me to stick with doing what I want to do, in the way I want to do it.”