"What ever happened to the Best Music Writing series?" As Vice reports, the 2012 issue, which was supposed to be edited by ?uestlove, was never published, although $17,733 was donated towards the book via Kickstarter. Where's the money? Series editor Daphne Carr says, "I have no comment."
Jonathan Lethem has put together an annotated playlist of songs that inspired his forthcoming novel, Dissident Gardens. Gang of Four, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan all make appearances.
Only seven months after Barnes and Noble founder Leonard S. Riggio announced his intent to buy 675 Barnes and Noble stores, Riggio abandoned the plan this week in light of the store’s declining profits. Barnes and Noble has also stopped conversations with Microsoft over whether to sell the company Barnes and Noble’s Nook media arm, which includes the company’s e-reader.
A twenty-two year old would-be author has decided not to self-publish her book after getting violent feedback to a question she posted on Goodreads. Before Lauren Howard’s book, Learning to Love, was released, “people started to rate 1-star to prove ‘we can rate whatever the hell we want.’ My book was added to shelves named ‘author should be sodomized’ and ‘should be raped in prison’ and other violent offensive things.” At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams considers how to police message boards when the line between a negative review and a physical threat is increasingly thin.
The Independent takes a close look at Dave Egger’s new novel, The Circle, about the “world’s most powerful internet company,” and weighs whether the book is actually based on Google.
An official in the Saratov region of Russia has called for the removal of Viktoriya Degtyareva’s GAYS. They Changed the World—a book that celebrates LGBT icons from Elton John to Oscar Wilde—from bookstores in Saratov, characterizing the book as “gay propaganda.”
Introducing “bookshelfies”: A Tumblr (and hopefully before long, a term) in which people take pictures of themselves in front of their bookshelves.
