ABA announces Bookseller Relief Fund
The American Booksellers Association announced that it is creating a Bookseller Relief fund to assist independent bookstores affected by Hurricane Katrina. Checks should be made payable to ABA/Bookseller Relief Fund and mailed to the ABA’s office at 200 White Plains Road, Tarrytown, NY 10591. Please write “Bookseller Relief” on the outside of the envelope. “Our…
continue readingBoD: The Thirsty Muse
Today’s Book-of-the-Day is The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer by Tom Dardis. The book examines the influence of alcohol on so many American authors. And the list is incredibly long. Five of the seven (at the time of publication) American Nobel laureates–Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck–were alcoholic.…
continue readingInterview: Andrew Vachss, Author
It’s 93 degrees, with high humidity that chokes like a punch in the throat. I sit in the car, sweating, unable to turn on the ignition, just needing to digest. Part of me wants to call every friend I know and another part of me wants to go mute, to withhold speech for days, just…
continue reading100 Years of Assistance in Playing the Ponies
Frank Deford has an interesting piece on SI.com about the 100th anniversary of the Daily Racing Form printing the esoteric and confusing past performance statistics for horse races. Deford writes “The scales fall from your eyes when you learn to read past performances. There are various signposts in your youth which speak to growing up:…
continue readingRIP R.L.
More sad news today… North Mississippi blues legend R.L. Burnside passed away last night. The AP reports “Burnside died Thursday morning at the St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. His health had been declining for some time, said Matthew Johnson, owner of Burnside’s record label, Fat Possum.” Burnside was a sharecropper early in his life…
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