I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it… –William Faulkner Faulkner’s little postage stamp was his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, immortalized as Jefferson, located in Yoknapatawpha County. Yoknapatawpha, from the Chickasaw yocona petopha, meaning water runs slow through […]
Monthly Archives: September 2014
My initial contact with Ann Frellsen at the first Decatur Book Festival had nothing to do with book conservation and everything to do with jewelry. She and several friends had a booth at the festival selling tiny book earrings, which were quite well made with lovely covers and even a few “pages” inside. Books are […]
What Strange Creatures, the most recent novel written by Emily Arsenault, is a story on the surface of a sister’s quest to prove her brother’s innocence after his girlfriend is found strangled by the roadside. Underneath that plot lies family pain and hardship through relationships that aren’t fulfilling, expectations that were not met, and a […]
Think censorship ended with the Banned in Boston days of James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence‘s Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Think again. Censorship–or attempts to censor–are alive and well. Next week is Banned Books Week. Learn more about efforts to protect our freedom on this page (below) from the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week: Celebrating the […]
Mike Lawson’s latest Joe DeMarco thriller opens with a Mafia guy saying to his boss, “We got a problem.” And indeed they do. The problem is Gino DeMarco, Joe’s father, who is a hit man for the mob. Gino’s murder by a compromised rookie cop under orders from the mob sets up the rest of […]
Every day from nine to six, a salaryman sits on a park bench. Unable to tell his wife he’s lost his job, the man boards the same train he has boarded for thirty years, bento box in hand. At noon each day he unwraps the box and slowly, in great contemplation, chews each bite. I […]
How has the internet transformed what we think of as more traditional distribution networks? How has Amazon, the largest online retailer for books, transformed the market? This last post will explore the issues particularly surrounding book distribution networks into the digital age. As of mid-2011, Amazon was the second largest total seller of physical books, […]
What do Karen Joy Fowler, Ron Rash, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, Barbara Brown Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Thrity Umrigar, Pat Conroy, and scores of others have in common? They all participated in the Decatur (Georgia) Book Festival this past weekend. The festival claims to be the largest independent book festival in the country. That […]
Readers Unbound 