Christopher Hitchens has been longlisted for the Orwell prize for a second year running. His final volume of essays, Arguably, joins 17 other works selected by judges from a record submission of 264 books. Hitchens, who died in December last year, made the 2011 shortlist for his memoir, Hitch-22, but missed out on the prize. Read more
The conversation about the Alexandria Quartet has been so fascinating this month that I’m reluctant to bring it to a close. You’ve probably heard enough from me, but there’s far more to discuss in the books than the few strands I’ve hit upon. So I’m thinking it might be fun to have an open thread where we can discuss anything and everything – and without fear of spoilers for those who haven’t unearthed the final revelations in Clea.
In June 1858 a slender package from Ternate, an island off the Dutch East Indies, arrived for Charles Darwin at his country home in Down, Kent. He may well have recognised the handwriting as that of Alfred Wallace, with whom he had been in correspondence and from whom he was hoping to receive some specimens. But what Darwin found in the package along with a covering letter was a short essay. And this essay was to transform Darwin’s life.
Take a look at Amazon’s ebook site and do a search for Harry Potter books and you will see something genuinely marvellous. Something that will warm the cockles of every publisher in the land, and perhaps even a few booksellers too.
Well, for a start, you will see that for the first time since the series began in 1997, official ebook versions of all seven titles in the Potter series are being sold. Read more
I’m not a rare book collector, not anymore. You can’t afford to be when you are a dealer, unless you have a lot more money than I do, or a lot less. When I was doing my DPhil on Conrad I accumulated a number of unprepossessing (dust wrapper presence and condition of book immaterial) first editions of his work, seldom for more than a few pounds. I needed these, I had been informed, because the most reliable text of a novel for scholarly purposes is usually the first edition. Read more