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Amazon and Hachette have been locked in a feud over eBook pricing since May 2014. Many members of the publishing community have spoken out about this situation and some have even mobilized to form the Authors United group.

Earlier this year, several high profile authors including Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and Ursula Le Guin agreed to join in Authors United’s fight against Amazon. Who convinced this illustrious group to take part? None other than Andrew Wylie.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the veteran literary agent shared his opinion on this dispute. For Wylie, “the issues at the heart of the conflict are both margin and price…Losing the fight over margins would be an immediate blow to the publishers’ profits, but losing control over pricing could be fatal.” Do you agree with Wylie?

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Several high profile writers have agreed to join in Authors United’s fight against Amazon. The new members include Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera, and Ursula Le Guin.

The organization aims to convince the online retail conglomerate to end its dispute with Hachette Book Group USA. Last month, Authors United publicly posted a letter addressed to Amazon’s board members asking them to take a stand on this issue.

When asked about her participation in the group, Le Guin submitted this statement to The New York Times: “We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author. Governments use censorship for moral and political ends, justifiable or not. Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.”

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At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]

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Here are some literary events to jump-start your week. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Sherman Alexie will be speaking about his new collection, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories at Barnes & Noble Union Square. See him on Monday, October 15th starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

The next installment of the Franklin Park Reading Series will feature Emma Straub, Michael Kimball and more. Hear them on Monday, October 15th at the Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden starting 8 p.m. (Brooklyn, NY)

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But what I am trying to describe now is not the melancholy of Istanbul but the hüzün in which we see ourselves reflected, the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community.  To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün.  I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags.  Of the old Bosphorous ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance.... 

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To go beyond the limits of our selves, to perceive everyone and everything as a great whole, to identify with as many people as possible, to see as much as possible: in this way, the novelist comes to resemble those ancient Chinese painters who climbed mountain peaks in order to capture the poetry of vast landscapes.  — Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

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When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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Jeff Howe has partnered with The Atlantic to relaunch the online book club, One Book, One Twitter. 

Howe explained in the announcement: “I’d always intended to relaunch One Book, One Twitter … It has a new name—1book140—but what hasn’t changed is the global, participatory nature of the affair: The crowd is still in charge.”

Twitter readers will choose the book to read in the online book club.  You can still vote on the following titles: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, The Keep by Jennifer Egan, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead. Reading will commence on June 1st.

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This year’s New Yorker Festival took place last weekend.  Twitter fans at the festival used the hashtag, #tnyfestival.

On Saturday, Joan Acocella (author of the vampire essay, “In the Blood”) moderated the Vampires Revival panel. On board to speak were philosophy professor Noel Carroll, horror novelist Stephen King, vampire film director Matt Reeves, and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. A video preview of the panel discussion is embedded above.

Several dozen King fans waited outside the venue only to be disappointed by King’s unwillingness to sign books. As he walked away with his arms in the air, he told the crowd: “I can’t sign guys, I got to get something to eat.” Alas, just because he’s a “king” doesn’t mean he isn’t human.

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From Jason Goodwin's review in yesterday's Washington Post: "Maureen Freely is best known as the English translator of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, but visitors to Istanbul may well recognize her as the daughter of John Freely, an American academic who has lived in Istanbul since the early 1960s and has written many useful guides to the city and its Ottoman past. That biographical detail is significant because Enlightenment is partly an autobiography. It's also a psychological thriller, a murder story, a rumination on friendship and a political investigation. If that sounds like a lot of weight for a novel to carry, it is; and it's a testament to Freely's ability that the novel does, in large measure, succeed. . . Enlightenment is a fluent, evocative and uncomfortable read, deliberately so. Stories overlap, testimonies conflict, even the time frame is repeatedly broken and re-arranged so that it becomes difficult to know who, if anyone, is telling the truth. . . This is a story almost impossible to summarize but hard to forget. It's remarkable for its descriptions of the city as it was in the 1970s and as it is now, after the break-up of the Soviet Union has released so much energy around the area. Freely is an almost perversely original writer, sharply observing the world she knows so well and upending all one's suppositions and assumptions. One example I found touching: Her grown-up student radicals do not shower their youthful selves with middle-aged reproof; they still crackle with energy and purpose. nlightenment may be too long and, at times, too opaque to win the audience it deserves, but it is a brave, unflinching work of art."

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