News in electronic books
27 May 2012 02:26:02
The companies did not reveal the terms of the deal, but Waterstones said it was planning a digital revolution in its stores, with Kindle e-readers on sale for the first time and free Wi-Fi, so customers can choose between buying a physical book or downloading it there and then. It is also opening instore cafes as part of an upgrade of the 30-year old chain.
Its managing director James Daunt, who once described the website as a "ruthless, money-making devil", struck a more positive note, calling... Read Full Story
What you know about book Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism written by John Updike
27 May 2012 02:22:40
Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike's prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike's professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: "to be professional ... Read Full Story
New role one of the most famous vampire
27 May 2012 02:20:46
Twilight star Robert Pattinson could be set to take a surprise role in the forthcoming sequel to The Hunger Games, according to a US blog.
Think McFly Think says it has the inside line on casting for Catching Fire, the second film of three or possibly four films based on Suzanne Collins's bestselling young adult books. Pattinson is reportedly in line to play Finnick Odair, a previous Hunger Games winner encountered by heroine Katniss Everdeen in the sequel.
In the books, Odair is an almost imp... Read Full Story
If you want to know about urban China - this book for you!
25 May 2012 12:30:51
Shi Cheng means "10 cities" and reveals the structural concept of this book, one in a series of story collections about groups of cities. The idea of the city as a "character" in fiction or film is very much of our times and conjures up notions of ceaseless noise and activity, the alienation of the individual in the roiling mass. These stories confound such expectations. Not only do they resist the noirish clichés of "urban fiction", they deny us any of the themes we might expect from China; chi... Read Full Story
A Bunch of Fives by Helen Simpson
25 May 2012 12:13:43
Simpson is the writer who most famously went where male writers were either too frightened or bored to tread: examining the "ever after" that follows the supposed happy ending. And doing so more or less unimprovably, against some highly stacked odds. She makes much of the inroads that motherhood carves into the intellect, and although not all of her characters have literary hinterlands, many of them have enough to notice the lack of fit between reading and child-rearing. In "Heavy Weather", the ... Read Full Story
What lifejournals would have queens and kings if in the middle centures is an internet -?
25 May 2012 12:11:03
The thoughts, sorrows, dreams, doubts, political opinions, gossip and passions of Queen Victoria, poured on to 43,000 pages of her private journals, have been launched online by her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth.
"It seems fitting that the subject of the first major public release of material from the royal archives is Queen Victoria, who was the first monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee," the Queen writes in a message to mark the launch, which follows an eight-month digitisation... Read Full Story
Harvey Pekar's Cleveland by Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant
24 May 2012 13:10:35
The stubborn, eloquent and curious Pekar spent his life in Cleveland, Ohio, working as a clerk and writing comics that celebrated the strangeness of everyday life. He died in 2010, and this posthumous graphic work is half straightforward memoir, half history of Cleveland, reaching from the city's founding at the malaria-ravaged mouth of the Cuyahoga River through steel production, baseball, riots and Pekar's childhood in a hardworking Polish-Jewish household. The historical material does a decen... Read Full Story
Opinion about new technologies in books industry
24 May 2012 13:08:54
Professor Peter Murray-Rust was looking for new ways to make better drugs. Dr Heather Piwowar wanted to track how scientific papers were cited and shared by researchers around the world. Dr Casey Bergman wanted to create a way for busy doctors and scientists to quickly navigate the latest research in genetics, to help them treat patients and further their research.
All of them needed access to tens of thousands of research papers at once, so they could use computers to look for unseen patterns ... Read Full Story
Orlando Figes retell russian stories
24 May 2012 13:04:38
When the British historian Orlando Figes admitted writing flattering reviews of his own work – and scathing attacks on rivals – on Amazon two years ago, his peers were aghast. Particularly those whose work had been damned as "awful" and "dense and pretentious". Damaging though the affair was, it did little to dent the scholar's reputation as a brilliant narrator of Soviet history, a man whose writing brought vividly to life the wretched decades in which an entire people was atomised by a paranoi... Read Full Story
Read new exciting book In the Making by GF Green
23 May 2012 01:23:01
Set partly in an upper-middle-class English home and partly in a boarding school, GF Green's novel describes the early youth and adolescence of Randal Thane. A coddled, sensitive child, Randal develops strong attachments – first to his sister, Katherine, then a boy named Felton – only to discover the pain of disappointment when the strictures of convention force his separation from the object of desire. Green himself chafed at those conventions. Posted with the British army to Ceylon as a PR man... Read Full Story
The way how to make one of the best book
23 May 2012 01:21:10
A Humument is an altered novel, begun in 1966 and first published in 1970. Phillips paints, draws and collages over the pages of an obscure 1892 novel – WH Mallock's A Human Document – leaving gaps for the original but transformed text to show through. Phillips has worked over the novel continuously through the decades: this year's edition will be the fifth. In 2010 A Humument appeared in digital form, as an app for iPhone and iPad. The technology suits it well: the brightly lit screen displays ... Read Full Story
From first book in the winners list!
23 May 2012 01:19:36
The novel, published by tiny independent press Choc Lit, was named winner last night. It beat titles by more established authors including Katie Fforde and Rosie Thomas. Judges including the Daily Mail's Jane Mays, Foyles' Jonathan Ruppin and WH Smith's Matt Bates praised its humour. They said: "It was a narrow choice between Please Don't Stop the Music and The Kashmir Shawl [by Thomas] but Jane's voice was fresh and new with an unexpected hero. It was a romance with dark undertones and it engag... Read Full Story
