Amazon Top 50

Say what you will about online book retailer Amazon and their electronic reading slate, Kindle, and how it is contributing to the downfall of the collective IQ, but I made an interesting discovery while perusing Amazon’s top 50 literary and fiction bestseller list this evening: people are exploring the classics thanks to the free access [...]

Agent Kafka and the Reappearing Pens

As the saboteur grew into his winter years and the bones in his sausage-shaped digits grew stiff with arthitis, Agent Kafka developed a fetish for two particular store-bought disposable ink pens, writing instruments that fit comfortably in his gnarled fingers, comfort being the prime objective since his job entailed the composition of copious notes in [...]

Can You Spell “Oligarchy”?

Glenn Beck sure as hell cannot. This arrives via my pal David Markland and while it’s funny as hell at first blush, give it a second and third look after you’re done pissing your pants with laughter and try to make sense of it all. (Apologies to my conservative friends out there but, c’mon, even [...]

“Faces of Sunset Boulevard” Wins SCIBA Award

According to Publisher’s Weekly, this year’s Southern California Independent Booksellers Awards show, held on Ocotber 24 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, boasted a larger turnout than usual:
SCIBA’s executive director Jennifer Bigelow reported that with 45 bookstores represented at the author luncheon and education seminars and 164 guests at the Feast and awards presentations, this [...]

Orson Welles and the Crowd

“He (Welles) was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of “The Man on the Ledge,” which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen hours on a window-sill of the Gotham Hotel before plunging into the street. “I stood in the crowd outside for a long time,” Welles says [...]