"A blow-by-blow account of what happened when two unassuming people decided to make a simple poetry book to sell out of the back of their car, this book provides both a how-to lesson in bookmaking and a consideration of books in a culture some call “postliterate.” Detailed is how these people found themselves awash in a world of big distributors, techno-talking printers, expensive lawyers, aggressive agents, touchy authors, demanding journalists, fast-talking publicists, and other book-industry types, in a ride that was both hair-raising and exhilarating."

Book

Business & Money

Johnson, Dennis Loy

Industries

Melville House Pub

Legendary New Yorker writer Adler takes a blistering look at the Bush versus Gore Supreme Court decision. Adler uncovers numerous problems, including instances where the judges mis-cited their own previous decisions or reversed themselves.

Irreparable Harm: The U.s. Supreme Court And The Decision That Made George W. Bush President

ADLER, Renata

Rules & Procedures

In this wonderfully witty and wide-ranging manifesto, noted book and movie critic David Kipen takes dead aim at that old film school canard, the auteur theory, and blows it sky-high with a theory of his own that he supports with a rollicking tour through movie history. Thanks to the auteurists, everyone nowadays credits the director with being the creative genius behind every movie. But, in what may be the first significant counter-theory to the notion invented by legendary critics Andrew Sarris, François Truffaut, and others, Kipen says, "Au contraire." Instead, inspired by "the mother tongue of America's first screenwriters," he uses the Yiddish word for writer to coin The Schreiber Theory, which decrees that knowing who wrote a film is often a far better-and far more consistent-guide to whether it was any good. Kipen's new heresy topples the old orthodoxy by studying the careers of the early writers who came to Hollywood from Broadway and the modern scriptwriters coming out of TV. Most usefully, the second half of the book is a who's who of screenwriters past and present, with entries on over 40 of Hollywood's most significant schreibers. There's plenty of film-world gossip along the way, as well as smart discussion of how the auteur theory took hold and what some other opponents-such as Pauline Kael-had to say about it. From the early days-when Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway labored in Hollywood-to today, when international sales are turning scripts into pidgin affairs, it's a clever and savvy consideration of movie-making from a whole new perspective. David Kipen is the former editor of Buzz Magazine and has written about movies for The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Boxoffice, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Los Angeles Times. He is currently the book critic for San Francisco Chronicle, as well as a weekly commentator on NPR's Day to Day program and on KCRW-FM in southern California.

The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History

Humor & Entertainment

Kipen, David

Movies

Speedboat

Literature & Fiction

Literary

What, I thought, was to prevent me from truly killing the author? Part murder mystery and all jet-black satire, and based on a real life scandal, this edgy novella tells the story of Léopold Sfax, world-renowned as the creator of "The Theory"—a bizarre literary theory that grew from an intellectual folly to a dominant school of criticism that enslaved college campuses across the country. However, The Theory, which holds that the text of any piece of writing tells us all that we need to know about its author (as if the author himself is "dead") takes on extra perversity when the revered—or is it feared?—Sfax is found to have once written something that seems...well, murderously revealing. In the hands of Gilbert Adair, it's a dexterously wrought and hysterically devilish look at academic cultishness. It's also a taut metaphysical murder mystery that confounds the reader's expectations on almost every page and reserves its most stunning surprise—the ultimate whodunit twist—for the very last page. The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

The Death of the Author (The Contemporary Art of the Novella)

Adair, Gilbert

Contemporary

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