Houston Great Books

This week we look back with an NPR commentator and ahead with the 2008 presidential candidates, waste time with a bike punk and four Wisconsin sisters, marvel at 40+ years of stunning boxing photos, and face death with famous chefs.

Sixty-four percent of accredited book reviewers feel that critics who write an unpaid blurb for a book should be banned from publishing a full review. And 76% of critics feel that if you haven’t read a work cover to cover you shouldn’t be critiquing it in print. These are just some of the findings of the NBCC’s 2007 ethics survey, the first one the organization has done in 20 years.

Self-described “pulp writer” Christa Faust, who recently won an award for her novelization of the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane, celebrates another coup with the January release of Money Shot: the first female writer in Dorchester’s neo-noir Hard Case Crime imprint. How does it feel to break into the Hard Case Crime boys’ club? It’s really fantastic, almost unreal.

In an attempt to provide an alternative to sales-driven bestsellers lists, the NBCC is launching a monthly list of recommendations compiled based on polls of well-known writers and critics, and NBCC members.

In this roundup: celebrity Bar Mitzvahs, the science of Oz, top-shelf drinking stories, the view from Mexico, ancient sex advice and the tragic demise of us, your humble critics.

Featured this week: William Steig, women in Iraq, the mysteries of time, Budweiser’s culinary aspirations, terrorist psyches and the unlikely power of the petite.

This week’s list gets salacious with carnal robots, striptease pioneer Gilded Lili St. Cyr and good old-fashioned Bets, Drugs and Rock & Roll; sentimental with family dinner and other people’s dogs; serious with psychotherapy and women’s tales of Choice; and sick fresh with Streewear from around the globe.

Is this guy—yep, that’s a picture of Andrew Carnegie—actually reincarnated in the body of Bill Gates?
Gates’ people have d…

Garth Conboy of eBook Technologies Inc., Frank Daniels III of Ingram, Bill McCoy of Adobe and Steve Potash of OverDrive won the latest bo…

“I had a system crash two years ago, and after restoring 60 e-books in PDF format I was unable to get them authorized again,” PC Magazi…

PW’s Calvin Reid likes the Kindle e-book reader. So do some others, such as a 75-year-old man enchanted with the Kindle’s large-type act. Thi…

E-book novices can be put off by the hassles of installing e-book software and dealing with DRM and the Tower of eBabel, all those clashing e-book …

So who else is running for the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main trade group in the e-book industry?
Nominations clos…

My friend Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is hardly a full-fledged geek; rather, a writer-poet-photographer and alum of David R. Godine, Inc., where she wor…

While some love the idea of one humongous company offering an iPod for e-books, the main e-book standards group is quietly working toward a more …

Think DRM is a necessary evil? Love the iPod model for e-books–built around Amazon’s Kindle? Today’s your day. E-Book Report’s guest blogger is …

People who’ve tried the Amazon Kindle tend to say it’s good for e-book novices who want a convenient, easy-to-learn e-book-reader.
But coul…

E-book prices of even new bestsellers are finally competitive with P–aided by Amazon’s discounting of the hits in Kindle format to $10, typically….

On Black Friday sales day, I resisted the urge to head to Best Buy for discounted gizmos, and instead I compared the prices of best-sellers from so…

Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the United States. PW readers outside the U.S. can get the real lowdown from an old column by the late Art Buchwal…