Author: Scott McKenzie

A Laugh at Lousy Book Covers

A reader passed along this Tumblr account, dedicated to Lousy Book Covers. Now, obviously, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, so yeah, maybe this one shouldn’t be included or that one isn’t that bad or whatever. But it’s at least a pretty humorous gaze through the results of ten minutes…

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Famed Faulkner Biographer Dies at 89

When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, noted William Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner visited campus. I met him in Square Books, the well-known independent bookstore where I worked at the time. I was heavily into Faulkner, stacking up class upon class, filling my transcript with as many Faulkner courses as possible.…

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Reviews that Say Nothing

A while ago, there was an uproar of discussion regarding the nature of book reviews and whether the critic should be, in the most simplistic way of speaking, “nice” or not. Quite a bit of the conversation centered on William Giraldi’s self-congratulatory, excessively assholish, show offy, “Let’s see how many references and allusions I can…

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Get Off My Damn Lawn! Says the Internet

As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month. To help folks blast through their 50,000 words in 30 days, GalleyCat has been providing writing prompts, tips, and words of encouragement. Most notable is this roundup where they collected two years worth of tips into a single post. This week, they referred to…

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Entertainment Mogul to Appear at Book Soup

Longtime entertainment and sports industry veteran David Fishof is appearing at Book Soup in Los Angeles today at 7:00pm. Once a sports agent to athletes like baseball slugger Lou Pinella and quarterbacks Vince Ferragamo and Phil Simms, Fishof switched his focus to the entertainment world in the eighties. He reunited the Monkees and started the…

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