U.S. Publishing: A British Journalist’s View
This week the Book Babes welcome British journalist Natasha Randall as our Guest Babe. She writes a column for the London-based Publishing News, commenting on book trends and the publishing industry in...
View ArticleJournalism’s Hot Potatoes
Hey Ellen,Here’s a book every journalist and editor coming back from summer vacation should open wide: “Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print.” Compiled by David Wallis, who runs Featurewell.com, a...
View ArticleThe Perils of Romance
Hey Ellen,Book editors traditionally do not review romance novels. Aside from the fact that most critics consider happy endings to be anti-intellectual (hey, life doesn’t usually have them, so why...
View ArticleComic Books for Big People
Hey Ellen,This week the Iranian author Marjane Satrapi is publishing “Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return,” her not-so-imaginatively named follow-up to the popular “Persepolis: The Story of a...
View ArticleKitty Kelley’s Unoriginal Sin
Hey Ellen,Question: What do “Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib” by Seymour Hersh, “The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency” by James Naughtie, and “The Family: The Real...
View ArticleBooks as ‘News About the Culture’: An Interview with Sam Tanenhaus
Poynter’s Book Babes — Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel — traveled to New York for “New York is Book Country,” the “New Yorker” festival, and the National Book Critics Circle board meeting. While they...
View ArticleAwarding Government Failure
Hey Ellen,I don’t suppose that government officials who write up the thousands of documents created each year in Washington usually care what the literati think of their prose. But the commissioners...
View ArticleCooking the Lists
Hey Ellen,Earlier this month, Marina Krakovsky, in an article for The Washington Post Book World about how bestseller lists are compiled, asked a simple question: If more reliable and more timely data...
View ArticleHoliday Book Glut
Hello Ellen!What is it about the holiday spirit that moves so many authors to write Christmas stories? Even the cranky H.L. Mencken wrote a Christmas tale for The New Yorker. Entitled ”Stare Decisis”...
View ArticlePredicting Disaster
Hey Ellen,After 9/11/01, when the world was reeling in shock from the hideous attacks on the World Trade Center, I wrote a column about what it was like being a book editor during a time of intense...
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