Alexandra Alter

Round-Down: Barnes & Noble Looks Beyond Books to Survive

Round-Down: Barnes & Noble Looks Beyond Books to Survive

Barnes & Noble may soon be extending its reach. CEO Ron Biore recently told Alexandra Alter at the New York Times that the company is looking to offer more games, toys, and small gifts in the future, sparking concern that the retailer would slowly move away from its core offering: books. There’s no doubt book retailers have suffered…

Round-Down: The Hogarth Series Will Reinvent Shakespeare’s Works As Novels

Round-Down: The Hogarth Series Will Reinvent Shakespeare’s Works As Novels

Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Gap of Time, released only one week ago, is the first book launched of a larger series, called The Hogarth Shakespeare. The series, from the revered Vintage Books, plans to do the very exciting and almost unthinkable: reimagine Shakespeare’s classic plays as novels penned by some of today’s finest modern writers….

Round-Down: Stephen King Releases Exclusive Short Story Audio

Round-Down: Stephen King Releases Exclusive Short Story Audio

In what Alexandra Alter at The New York Times calls an “unusual experiment,” Stephen King has released a short story, “Drunken Fireworks,” which is forthcoming in his collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. The collection is slated for a November 2015 release, making this a months-advance sneak peek at the eagerly anticipated work. In the…

Round-Down: “Governments Make Bad Editors,” Authors Protest During BookExpo America

Round-Down: “Governments Make Bad Editors,” Authors Protest During BookExpo America

BookExpo America 2015 (BEA), one of the leading book conferences internationally and held this year in New York, was recently host to a five-hundred-person delegation from the Chinese government, representing one-hundred publishing houses–attendance that BookExpo has described as “unprecedented” and which covered over twenty-thousand square feet of convention space. On the steps of the New York Public…

Round-Down: The Torture Report Book

  On December 30th, 2014, acclaimed independent publisher Melville House released a print copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program”—also known as the Senate Torture Report. Though the material is in the public domain (has been since December 9th, is only a summary of the actual…