Doña Barbara, Gallegos, and the Backstory of a Book's Lifetime
Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U. of Chicago Press, about how Doña Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos, which had been ...
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"Purgatory" by Tomás Eloy Martínez [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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BTBA Reading Group, BTBA Display
I didn’t notice this until just now, but Joshua Mostafa has set up a book club on LibraryThing to read a book a month from the BTBA Shortlist. He needs a few more members to get this rolling, so anyone who’s interested should head here and join up. It’s free, easy, will be great fun, etc. (And it’s ...
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Indie Bookstores, Google Preview, and the Interwebs
Below is a special guest post from Jeff Waxman, bookseller at Seminary Co-op in Chicago (one of the five greatest indie bookstores in America) and managing editor of The Front Table. As someone who loves independent bookstores—and worked in them for years—I really want to see them survive, but Jeff’s post ...
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Editors Speak Piece on Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring
Jeff Waxman from The Front Table was kind enough to let me write a pretty long piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, a book that I absolutely love. Rodoreda’s something special, and the book (which is paper-over-board—get it while it’s hot!) has one of the most intricate, fitting, and cool covers ...
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Latest Review: The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales
Our latest review is of Guillermo Rosales’s The Halfway House, which is coming out from New Directions next month. Rosales was a Cuban exile who was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and ended up committing suicide. Before taking his own life, he destroyed most of his writings, leaving behind only two works: The ...
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Two More Taker Reviews
Rubem Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories continues to get some really good coverage, including two recent reviews at The Front Table and The National. The Front Table is Seminary Co-op’s online newsletter/review magazine. It’s been around in one form or another for almost two decades, and the current ...
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