I’ve known my friend George Gibson since 1979 when he paid a call as a sales rep on Undercover Books, the bookstore I then ran in Cleveland with my sibling and our parents. George, now publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, hosted an event Nov. 1 at the Grolier Club, one of NY’s most distinguished book […]
Richard Nash is a very smart publishing person, and plenty smart enough to know when an experimental direction he’s taken isn’t working out. As a result, he gave a talk this week at the Books into Browsers conference in San Francisco conceding that Cursor, the enterprise he announced with great anticipation in 2010, hasn’t really […]
Neil’s the best. What a beautiful concert he played for the kids at the Bridge School. The lyrics of “Sugar Mountain,” all about the uneasy passage from childhood to adulthood, are especially meaningful here. The cover of the old Youngbloods song, “Get Together,” was a special way to close the night. I treasure Neil Young.
In recent months there have been a number of terrific graphic novels released, including Kate Beaton’s Hark, Vagrant, Michael Kupperman’s rendition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010, Ludovic Debeurme’s Lucille, and Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Last April, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival I had the privilege of covering a special comics reading […]
The personal essay pasted in below chronicles a formative episode in my publishing career, when I had the privilege of working with William Styron on an Introduction to a nonfiction book that told the story of an innocent man on Death Row in Virginia. It was called Dead Run and Styron helped me champion it to […]
Tuesday night Nov. 1 was an exciting evening and got the new month off with a real bang. After participating in the reception for the American Philosophical Society at the Grolier Club (detailed in another post) I went to Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena for PEN America’s reception for new members, of which I am one. Saw […]
Toronto musician Matt Barber came though NYC this week and played a dynamic set of his own songs. He was joined on one tune by his girlfriend, actress Alexis Taylor. They sang lovely harmonies together. The venue was the performance room at Brooklyn’s Rock Shop, which has a fabulous warm sound. Also playing were the […]
Excellent Slate article by Christopher Hitchens on Mormonism, its core beliefs, and how it should be discussed in the context of the presidential campaign. Hitch’s piece includes a reference to a terrific book I republished in 1995, by Facebook friend Alex Shoumatoff. It’s his superb study of human kinship and genealogy, The Mountain of Names. […]