Search Results for: paperback island

Marshall Brooks Talks to Biblioklept About Microlibraries, Indie Publishing, and His New Book, Paperback Island

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Marshall Brooks’s recent collection of memoir-essays Paperback Island explores the ways that friendship and place influence what we read, how we read, and how we make—and keep—books. Marshall began his career in publishing in 1971, reading manuscripts for Harry Smith at his legendary publishing house The Smith. In 1979 he created Arts End Press. Subtitled Street Bibliography Essays, Marshall’s latest… Continue reading Marshall Brooks Talks to Biblioklept About Microlibraries, Indie Publishing, and His New Book, Paperback Island

I Review Paperback Island, Marshall Brooks’s Love Letter to Books and the People Who Make Them

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There’s something gently elegiac about Marshall Brooks’s Paperback Island, which collects over a dozen essays on reading. While Brooks’s essays on books, libraries, publishers, and the friendships that hold all of them together are never dour, they nevertheless evoke a world now shifting into the realm of memory alone. It’s fitting then that the starting… Continue reading I Review Paperback Island, Marshall Brooks’s Love Letter to Books and the People Who Make Them

Paperback Island (Lovely and Vibrant Book Acquired, 4.05.2013)

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Marshall Brook’s memoir-in-essays, Paperback Island arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters today. Brooks’s book snagged me into an hour of reading I hadn’t planned on doing, even from the preface (I usually skim or skip prefaces, but Brooks’s hooked me—he opens at Tuli Kupferberg’s funeral and then talks about reading a book that required him to actually stay… Continue reading Paperback Island (Lovely and Vibrant Book Acquired, 4.05.2013)

Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is an abject coming-of-age novel narrated by a teenage psychopath

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Frank Cauldhame, the narrator of Iain Banks’s 1984 debut novel The Wasp Factory, is a teenage psychopath. Frank lives with his eccentric father on an island in rural Scotland. He is an unregistered person with “no birth certificate, no National Insurance number,” nothing to officially prove his existence. He enjoys this unofficial existence, patrolling his… Continue reading Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is an abject coming-of-age novel narrated by a teenage psychopath

Blog about some recent reading (Bolaño/Cain/Calvino/Dara/Johnson)

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My James M. Cain discovery tour continued with Double Indemnity, which I loved loved loved. The novel’s terse, mean, a bit queasy, and zippy as hell. Over the July 4th weekend my uncle and I made plans to watch Billy Wilder’s 1944 film adaptation, but maybe heat and alcohol got in the way. I’ll get to… Continue reading Blog about some recent reading (Bolaño/Cain/Calvino/Dara/Johnson)

Three Books

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Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Fat trade paperback by Vintage; most recent date indicates 1975 but that can’t be right. No designer credited. You know Poe. Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston. 1983 trade paperback edition from Turtle Island. Neither designer nor photographer are credited. A wonderful and weird trip to Jamaica… Continue reading Three Books

Blog about some books acquired, 17 July 2019 (and some Poe and Whitman illustrations)

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Despite having a pretty large TBR stack, I killed this afternoon’s spare hour at my favorite used bookstore. This particular bookstore is a maze of used books, labyrinthine walls of books, with ever-mutating shelves growing from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. I confess I don’t always stoop low—I get old, I… Continue reading Blog about some books acquired, 17 July 2019 (and some Poe and Whitman illustrations)

Blog about giving books away and buying books for a friend and acquiring some books for myself

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This morning my dean told me that I needed to pack up my office over the summer as the building I’m in will be undergoing a renovation. Even though I knew this was coming, the prospect hit me as a series of big anxiety waves. My walls are covered with masks, art, pictures. I have… Continue reading Blog about giving books away and buying books for a friend and acquiring some books for myself

A review of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s prescient dystopian novel We

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Set millennia in the future, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel We tells the story of a man whose sense of self shatters when he realizes he can no longer conform to the ideology of his totalitarian government. Zamyatin’s novel is a zany, prescient, poetic tale about resisting the forces of tyranny, conformity, and brute, unimaginative groupthink.… Continue reading A review of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s prescient dystopian novel We

Blog about some books and some book covers and acquiring some books and not acquiring some books

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I went to the book store this afternoon to pick up a copy of the latest graphic novel in by Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series for my kids, and of course I browsed a while. Looking for a copy of Anne Carson’s Plainwater, I ended up finding Angela Carter’s 1972 novel Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. It’s a British edition, 1985,… Continue reading Blog about some books and some book covers and acquiring some books and not acquiring some books

Books Acquired, 6.25.2012—Or, Here’s What’s New from Picador This Month

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A nice stack from the good folks at Picador this month, including two new entries in their ongoing Nadine Gordimer reissues. I like the design on the series: There’s also a reissue of Denis Johnson’s 1991 novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which I haven’t read, but will read soon, because Johnson is just one of… Continue reading Books Acquired, 6.25.2012—Or, Here’s What’s New from Picador This Month