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Happy new year, rgz! Sending our love and wishes for many great books to fall into your hands.

I started 2016 off with:



How about you?

When I was a college sophomore, I thought everything I needed to know could be learned from a book. My best friend, Claire*, and I decided to create an independent study on the topic that most fascinated and confounded us at that age: love. We spent hours planning the syllabus in her second-floor single, with [...]

Barnes & Noble asked 100 authors to sign 5,000 copies of their latest books. Some of the participants include The Goldfinch author Donna Tartt, Inferno novelist Dan Brown, Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy writer E. L. James, Humans of New York blogger Brandon Stanton, and children’s book creator Jeff Kinney.

These 500,000 autographed books will be made available at Barnes & Noble’s 650+ brick-and-mortar locations. The data from the previous two holiday seasons show that the retailer’s sales figures have been in decline for both the digital store and physical shops.

Here’s more from The New York Times: “Drawing customers into its physical stores has become an urgent priority for Barnes & Noble. The chain has been battered in recent years by competition from Amazon and by a sluggish book market. It has closed more than 20 stores since summer 2013 and will spin off its money-losing Nook division into a separate company next year…Some authors said they hoped the new campaign would help the struggling chain.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Michelle Aielli has been named executive director of publicity at Hachette Books. She will report to publisher Mauro DiPreta.

In new new role, Aielli will oversee the publicity for both the division’s brand and the titles on its list. The start date for her new position has been set for November 17th.

For the past 10 years, Aielli has worked in the Little, Brown PR team. She launched and managed campaigns for James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, Donna Tartt, Keith Richards, Elin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Safran Foer, and more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Warner Brothers has snatched up the movie rights to The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Brett Ratner, Brad Simpson, and Nina Jacobson have signed on as producers.

Tartt’s lengthy fiction title won her the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year. She devoted 11 years to working on this book.

Here’s more from The Huffington Post: The Goldfinch, Tartt’s third novel, has sold at least 1.5 million copies, despite clocking in at an intimidating 784 pages — a length that may pose a challenge for the film adaptation. The novel, a coming-of-age story about a boy whose grief over his mother’s senseless death is assuaged by his dangerous and illegal love for a priceless painting, drew comparisons to Charles Dickens upon its publication and has continued to command critical attention and popular sales.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As of January 2014, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars may have become the most frequently purchased book in 48 states within the nation. The Mashable team arrived at this conclusion after combing through the data for both print book and Kindle eBook sales on Amazon.

The only 2 states with different results appear to be Washington D.C. and Hawaii; D.C. readers are enjoying The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Hawaiian bibliophiles prefer Soul Healing Miracles by Dr. Zhi Gang Sha. What was the last book you purchased?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green has moved up to the top position of Apple’s Top Paid iBooks in the U.S. this week.

Apple has released its top selling books list for paid books from iBooks in the U.S. for week ending 5/5. The Target by David Baldacci; Alpha by Jasinda Wilder; Insurgent by Veronica Roth and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt also made the list.

We’ve included Apple’s entire list after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Time has released its list of “100 Most Influential People.”

A number of writers have been included in this illustrious group such as young adult novelist John Green, nonfiction author Barbara Brown Taylor, memoirist Malala Yousafzai, novelist Arundhati Roy, and Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt. Yousafzai actually makes two appearances because she contributed a short piece honoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Author Donna Tartt has won The Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her book The Goldfinch. The novel about an orphan, also won Amazon’s Best Books of the Month “Spotlight Pick” in October 2013 and was shortlisted for 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Flick by Annie Baker won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Alan Taylor‘s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 won the prize for History. Megan Marshall‘s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life took the Pulitzer for the Biography category. Vijay Seshadri won the Poetry prize for 3 Sections.

Dan Fagin‘s Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation won the prize for General Nonfiction. John Luther Adams‘ Become Ocean took the prize for Music.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This book is perfect. My reading of it was more of an immersion. I loved Theo and Boris. I felt I was there with the characters and in their heads. I could not stop reading this book! It's one of the best books of the year. Books mentioned in this post The Goldfinch Donna Tartt [...]

We asked our readers: What was the last book that you couldn't put down, that kept you up all night, that you couldn't stop recommending? We were delightfully surprised by the number of replies we received. Here are some of our favorites. We'll be posting more on a regular basis, so check back often. And [...]

Amazon has revealed the bestselling books of 2012, a list led by Donna Tartt, Khaled Hosseini and David Finkel.

We’ve reprinted the top 10 books on the list below. Follow this link to see all 100. You can also check out the company’s top 100 lists for Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction, Digital Singles and Children’s Books for the year. Amazon also created a free Kindle eBook of the top books list if you’d like to read it on your device. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Donna Tartt is a true enigma. She is a phenomenal bestseller with a cult following. There isn’t very much known about her but you wouldn’t call her a reclusive author either. The Goldfinch is her third novel in twenty years, a decade gap between each book. All of them worth the wait.

And the wait is almost over. The Goldfinch will be released on October 23rd and we have a very special, exclusive prize to giveaway.

Pre-order The Goldfinch before October 23 and go into the draw to win a signed and numbered collectors edition boxed set of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History & The Little Friend worth $350.

This is a must for any Donna Tartt Fan.

Pre-order The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt…

Also available in hardback and a special limited deluxe edition

Here’s the blurb..

Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love – and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph – a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.

For Tin House’s site, I write about finding solace for the slow pace of my own novel in the writing of Donna Tartt and my friend Alexander Chee.

The Daily Beast asked some writers — Donna Tartt, Junot Díaz, Chris Adrian, Geoff Dyer, Karen Russell, Sherman Alexie, Siri Hustvedt, Darin Strauss, Téa Obreht, Kathryn Stockett, Alexandra Fuller, Anne Enright, Elisabeth Kostova, Alexander McCall Smith, and me — about our favorite summer books.

Mine is John Colapinto’s first (and, so far, only) novel, About the Author. What I said:

I read John Colapinto’s hilarious, propulsive, and gorgeously written About the Author in a single day almost exactly eight years ago, before the rise, demise, and resurrection of James Frey, when I knew next to nothing about publishing but had great expertise in planning to write and not writing. The novel’s narrator, Cal Cunningham, has also perfected this skill. A supposed wordsmith, he spends his days shelving books at a big midtown bookstore, nights going from bar to bar picking up girls and getting laid, and Sunday mornings filling his dull law student roommate in on his escapades. Our hero’s sense of superiority is shattered when he discovers that the roommate hasn’t been locked in his room typing tedious legal briefs but working on a novel, one that’s actually good, one that sounds suspiciously like Cunningham’s own life, so much so that when the roommate dies unexpectedly… Well, I’ve already said too much, but it’s a remarkable book, a confessional literary thriller that makes you care about its plagiarist narrator even as it reveals him to be a coward and a liar and satirizes the publishing and media world that exalts him.

I’ve been blogging so long, I can point exactly to when I first read About the Author, a gift from Emma early in our friendship. (I didn’t know then that the novel took Colapinto thirteen years to write. No judgment here.)

Head over to the Daily Beast for the other picks.

    A few weeks ago, Ben Mikaelsen came to our school as this year's visiting author.  Ben was a delight, and I'll write more about his visit in another post, but for now, I want to concentrate on his philosophy about writing. 

    "Writing," he said, "is storytelling." 

Of all of the things that I got out of Ben's visit, and there were many, this simple sentence resonated with me in a way that I never would have expected. It stuck in my brain and kept tap, tap, tapping through my thoughts. You see, in some fantasy world of mine, I consider myself a writer.  I always have, from the time I was very young, around seven or eight years old.  It's all I wanted to do.  Well, that and read.

    So, why did the utterance of this sentence have such an effect on me?  I think I figured it out. See, the thing is, as much as I love to write, I am not much of a storyteller. What Mr. Mikaelsen was talking about was just letting go of the notion that every word needs to be weighty and special and telling the story you want to tell.  That has always been so incredibly hard for me.  When I write fiction, I gnaw my knuckles over every syllable and twist of phrase.  I get so caught up in trying to make every word the perfect word, I end up writing in nothing but fits and starts. Sometimes I even give up, thinking that it'll just never be perfect so why bother.

    Even now, as I write this post, I'm stewing about words.  How does one overcome that?  Because I think Ben is absolutely right.  The story is much more important than the words themselves.  If you can tell a great story, you can get around to fixing the words later.  Maybe in one of the fifteen full revisions that Ben says he does to each of his books!

    I have actually written a book, a YA novel called The Power of Merit Ruhl, which took me two years to write. I'm proud of it. I had a story I wanted to tell, and I told it.  But I agonized over words the whole time.  Now, I want to try to tell more stories.  I want to write a sequel to my book, and even make it into a series.  I have the stories to tell, the arc for each of the four major characters, in my head.  The question is will I be able to set aside my obssession with words and just tell the stories? 

    My favorite books tell really amazing stories. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a good example of this. If you've never read it, go out right now and get yourself a copy.  It's the story of a small group of friends at a private college who do a terrible thing and then have to hide their mess.  This story left me breathless.  There is one point of such delicious suspense that I practically ripped the book because I was holding it so hard.  Another example of spectacular storytelling: Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier, a book that, though I've read it many times and even taught it, can still keep me enraptured to the very last page.  I don't necessarily remember all of the fancy phrasing and uses of foreshad