Writers and Editors

Plus blogs, links to author interviews, resources for critics and book reviewers
• General links (book news, reviews, and author interviews; book and reviewer blogs; resources for critics and book reviewers
• Social networking for book lovers
• Blog roll -- good book and lit blogs
• Mysteries--recommended reading sites


With some periodicals, you may have to register to view the publication online (usually for free, except maybe for book reviews). They want the demographic information so they know where (and how old) their readers are and thus to whom their (dreamed-of) online advertisers will be able to market their wares.

General Links

Audio Books (formerly books on tape, but CDs and digital downloads are taking over the market)
• Audie Winners (2001 on, along right -- recordings awarded best narration etc.--a good list from which to check out recordings from library)
• Audible Yahoo Group (consumer discussion group sponsored by Audible.com, but not limited to Audible titles)
• AudioFile (magazine/​website for those who love audio books, with reviews)
• Books for Ears (see review archive
• Review of Audiobook Services

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Author Links for Mystery Authors (Mainely Murders links -- a store where you can not only find a good selection but also trade in certain mysteries in excellent condition)

Back From the Dead: The State of Book Reviewing by Jane Ciabattari (The Practical Writer Sept-Oct 2011, Poets&Writers)

Biblioklept (review and discuss books and interview authors, publishers, and other book-type people)

Blog roll -- good book and lit blogs

• (Megan Sullivan, head buyer at Harvard Book Store, thoughtfully reviews books)
• Book Slut (Jessa Crispin, reviews, feature stories, interviews, and other book-related content)
• Book Square (dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism)
• Dear Reader (Suzanne Beecher's online book club). She's profiled here by Bill Duncan.
• A Commonplace Blog (D.G. Myers, whose credits include the much-discussed blog article The most overrated novel ever (Beloved by Toni Morrison)
• The Shatzkin Files (Mike Shatzkin, Idea Logical Company, a publishing futurist who writes interesting analyses of the shift toward digital publishing and where book publishing is headed)
• Publishers Lunch (the publishing industry's daily essential read, free) and if you $subscribe to Publishers Marketplace you can read Publishers Lunch Deluxe
• Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (reviews of romance novels)
• The Book Trib (an aggregator of all the best book-related blogs
• PowellsBooksBlog
• So Many Books (Stephanie, in Books, Rambling)
• Some Choice Book Blogs (Cynthia Crossen (WSJ, 11-13-09)
More to come!

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Bookish.
Publishers Make a Plan: A ‘One Stop’ Book Site (Julie Bosman, NY Times, 5-6-11). Three publishers (Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette), frustrated few book buyers visit their company sites, have created Bookish.com, hoping it will become a destination for readers the way Pitchfork.com is for music lovers and IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Netflix are for films -- where site visitors can read recommendations, reviews, and recommendations from other readers and can buy books from the site or other retailers. (The article doesn't mention Amazon.com. The Bookish staff will select books from 14 or more publishers.

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. Clive James' classic poem about about literary schadenfreude, as posted by Dwight Garner on the NY Times Paper Cuts blog about books.

Book reviewing panel. C-Span video of 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book panel discussion of the business of book reviews, with panelists Ron Charles, deputy editor of Washington Post Book World, David Montgomery, thriller and mystery Critic for the Daily Beast and Chicago Sun-Times, and authors Rebecca Skloot and Katharine Weber.

Book Review Podcasts. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, talks each week to authors, editors, and critics about new books, the literary scene, and current best sellers. The downloadable audio files are in mp3 format.

Books and Beyond and other public events at the Library of Congress (Washington DC)

Conversations with Literary Websites (Mark Athitakis, Critical Mass, blog of the National Book Critics Circle)
• Washington Independent Review of Books
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Full Stop
• Three Percent
• The Critical Flame
• Open Letters Monthly
• The Quarterly Conversation

C-Span Podcasts (After Words, Washington Today, Podcast of the Week, Q and A, The Communicators, etc.)

Curled Up With a Good Book. (LL writes: "highly entrepreneurial e-zine; reviewers work for free and do a good job (on the six reviews I've read so far")

DailyLit. Receive short book installments by email or RSS feed (bite-size chunks of public domain books. Read on any computer or mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) (whenever you like). We learned of this from Cool Tools -- any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. (Thanks to Dan Curtis for this tip)

Dear Author (bloggers/​reviewers who love romance books and a smattering of other genre and nonfiction books)

Dirda's Reading Room (ongoing discussions of books, including Best Books for Scientists, Genre Books as Works of Art, Wild, Wild Western Literature, What Are Your Favorite 'Best Worst' Works of Fiction and Poetry. Older discussions here.

Does anyone want to be "well-read? by Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times 4-16-11) on changing ideas of "must reads."

The Fallen Status of Books, Hard Times for Hardcovers, by Jack Schaefer (Slate, 9-9-10).

Flashlight Worthy (Peter Steinberg and Eric Mueller provide many and various recommended reading lists on topics of interest to book lovers -- a culling of books with Amazon links)

The Future of Book Reviewing (Karen Long, Critical Mass, NBCC, 6-3-10)

Historian Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages for fake reviews on Amazon (Alexandra Topping, Guardian, 7-16-10). Historian to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after he posted reviews "praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals."

How NOT to react to negative criticism for a self-published novel (Big Al's Books and Pals reviews a poorly edited novel and author melts down in public)

In Praise of Book Critics (Cynthia Crossen, Dear Book Lover, Wall Street Journal, 11-28-11)

Interviews with Authors (Barnes & Noble series), includes interviews such as the following (a small sample from a great series):
• David Brooks (a conversation with James Mustiche 3-17-11)
• Patton Oswalt (A conversation with Kerry Lauerman, 2-3-11, from Salon.com, who has partnered with B&N for many of these interviews)
• Stacy Schiff (author of Cleopatra)


Interviews (video) with and about authors
• Literary Fathers: James Jones and Andre Dubus. Interviews about them with their children, Kaylie Jones and Andre Dubus III (Open Road Integrated Media)
• Literary Fathers: John Gardner, Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, and William Styron. Interviews with Lucy Gardner Johnson, Joel Gardner, Molly Elkin, Nile Southern, and Alexandra Styron (Open Road Integrated Media)

Kirkus Reviews lives on. Motoko Rich reports that Kirkus Gets A New Owner — From The NBA (NY Times 2-10-10). In December he'd reported that End of Kirkus Reviews Brings Anguish and Relief (NYTimes, 12-11-09). Starred reviews were rare; negative reviews were not. Here's the link to the old Kirkus Reviews

The Millions (C. Max Magee's popular online literary, arts, and culture site--good reading lists and comments)

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Mysteries -- Recommended Reading sites
• Cozy Mystery List and Cozy Mystery List blog. A helpful way of presenting the lists winners of Malice Domestic's Agatha Awards (traditional mysteries that contain no explicit explicit sex, gratuitous gore, or excessive violence).
• General Mystery Websites (links to sources for mystery reviews, blogs, true crime, mysteries in film and tv, etc.)
• Mysteries by Location
• Mystery News (good through 2009, when it ceased publication)
• Mystery Reader
• Mystery Scene magazine
• Stop. You're Killing Me! (a website to die for if you love mysteries)

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National Book Critics Circle
• NBCC FAQs
• Archive of NBCC newsletters
• Past winners of NBCC awards
• The National Book Critics Circle at 35 (Jack Miles on the 1980s and 1990s)

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National Book Festival podcasts from the Library of Congress festival on the National Mall.
• Podcasts from Bookfest 2011 (Terry McMillan, Jessica Harris, Adam Goodheart, David McCullough, Russell Banks)
• Podcasts from Bookfest 2010 (Ken Follett, Jane Smiley, Anchee Min, Judith Viorst, Isabel Allende, Pat Mora, Rae Armantrout)
• Podcasts from Bookfest 2009 (Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Michael Connelly, Junot Diaz, Gwen Ifill, John Irving, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, Lois Lowry, Rickey Minor, Walter Mosley, James Patterson, George Pelecanos, Jodi Picoult, Jon Scieszka, Nicholas Sparks, David Wroblewski)
• Podcasts from Bookfest 2008 (Louis Bayard, Jan Brett, Geraldine Brooks, Warren Brown, Joseph Bruchac, Marisa de los Santos, Kimberly Dozier, Sharon M. Draper, Arthur Frommer and Pauline Frommer, Philippa Gregory, Walter Isaacson, Brad Meltzer, Cokie Roberts, Peter Robinson, Kay Ryan, Bob Schieffer, Jon Scieszka, Michelle Singletary, R.L. Stine, Dionne Warwick)
• Podcasts from Bookfest 2007 (Terry Pratchett, Maria Celeste Arrarαs, Charles Simic, Rosemary Wells, Victoria Rowell, Patricia MacLachlan, Sanjay Gupta, Ken Burns, Megan McDonald, David Baldacci, Holly Black, Carmen Agra Deedy, David Wiesner, Shelia P. Moses)

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New Books Network.
Discussions with authors about their new books -- a consortium of podcasts dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to serious audiences. Dozens of categories, which include:
• New Books in Biography (Oline Eaton interviewing)
• New Books in History
• New Books in Religion
• New Books in Education
• New Books in Film
• and so on!

100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read (the book) by Karl Bridges. This pricey hardcover book is "a resource for readers of American fiction who’ve read their way through the standard canon of classics. 'One goal of this book,' Bridges writes in his Introduction, 'is to represent a wide time span–one equaling the length of American history.'' The novels listed cover a full 200 years: from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker(1797) to Charles T. Power’s In the Memory of the Forest (1997). You can find a list of the 100 novels on Neglected Books.

Profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (Ellen McCarthy, WashPost, 1-7-10--an interesting story!)

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything. Linda Holmes (NPR, 4-18-11) on how, with so much music and literature out there, we can't get to it all, so we must "cull" (sort what is or isn't worth our time) or "surrender" (this goes on the list of what I won't get to).

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Social networking for book lovers

• LibraryThing (enter what you're reading, or your whole library--and connect with people who read what you read)
• GoodReads (a popular site for rating and commenting on books,for keeping track of what you read, and would like to read--or forming a book club, answering trivia, or collecting your favorite quotations)
• Shelfari (another popular site for rating and commenting on books -- a community-powered virtual bookshelf, to display your favorite books and connect to people who love to read what you love to read)
• BookCrossing (a popular book sharing site, with some paid features, including book tagging: You register a book, get a Bookcrossing ID, use that to physically tag a book, and release it (e.g., leave it in a coffee shop or on the subway). The person who finds the book you set free can register it, so you can follow where it travels)
• inReads (WETA, DC's public television affiliated, launched inRead 6-22-11, in Beta). Lets users converse about books, read reviews and get recommendations. Read (PW account here.
• Scribd (pronounced "skribbed") may be the largest book club in the world--on many topics
• Kobo's Reading Life. Explore. Unlock. Share.
• Wattpad (an eBook community). Fiction-oriented. Read stories. Vote for your favorites. Create a library.
• Bookperk. HarperCollins' site offers perks for "insiders."
• Nook Friends (Barnes & Noble site for Nook readers)
• BookMooch (Give books away. Get books you want.)
• PaperBack Swap (a paperback book sharing service and community)
• Revish (a book rating community)
• Reviews of these and other niche social networking sites (Kevin Palmer, Social Media Answers)

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[Go Top]

So What Do You Do, Tom Lutz, Editor of Los Angeles Review of Books? Cameron Martin's interview with TL (Media Bistro, Avant Guild 10-26-11)

Writer Races to Victory From Way Off the Pace. Novelist Jaimy Gordon was a long shot for the National Book Award for fiction, with her novel Lord of Misrule, which won. "To write a novel that was even remotely commercial...she had to get out of Providence, where even to think of such a thing was considered a sell out..." Janet Maslin describes the novel as "so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue."