The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. Read more
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Category: Miscellaneous
Nine Books That Will Actually Make You Laugh
Let’s be honest: What passes for funny in book marketing falls beneath the standard just about everywhere else. The number of published works that say “Hilarious!” on their cover but turn out to be merely quirky—or the dreaded wacky—is enough to make a reader cynical. Read more
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Read Your Way Through the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
The poet and novelist Luis Alberto Urrea thinks the borderlands are the most interesting book in the world, being rewritten every day. These are his recommendations. Read more
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Science Fiction From Latin America, With Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon
The writing, in Spanish and Portuguese, is radical and idiosyncratic, teeming with technoshamans and futuristic Indigenous aesthetics while also influenced by the region’s European and African heritages. Troubled histories and the urgency of the present inspire it, too, with themes of colonization, the climate crisis and migration. Read more
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46 Books that Changed the World
Here, in no particular order, are just a few of history’s most influential tomes—and how they made humanity look at things in a new light. Read more
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Verses are Soaring Into Space — Literally
The Mexican American’s new poem will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission spacecraft and travel 1.8 billion miles — and the public can send their names along. Read more
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A Map of 1,001 Novels to Show Us Where to Find the Real America
Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Read more
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Man Returns Library Book 96 Years After Due Date
A Northern California man returned a book to his local library this month — an astounding 96 years after the book was originally due. The book, “A History of the United States” by Benson Lossing, was checked out in 1927 and is not in perfect shape, but the St. Helena Public Library was happy to receive it and spared the man what otherwise could have been about $1,700 in late fees. Read more
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Read Your Way Around Los Angeles
Héctor Tobar is a son of Los Angeles, a city of “perpetual cultural mixing.” Here, he guides readers through the books and writers that cut through the city’s layers. Read more
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The Work of the Audiobook
THE WORLD OF FICTION is changing, and it is happening at 1.5X speed. According to British sociologist and book trade expert John B. Thompson, the market for audiobooks has grown astronomically since the turn of the 21st century. Once upon a time, publishers would pore over their catalogs, choosing only a select few titles to produce as audiobooks, a format that tended to account for about 10 percent of a book’s sales. These days, when an audiobook can make up anywhere from one to 50 percent of a book’s sales, publishers cover the spread by producing far more titles. From 2011 to 2017, the number of new audiobooks produced each year grew from 7,200 to more than 46,000. Read more
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