The Picador Book Room

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:38:00 -0400

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.” ―Salman Rushdie

Happy Birthday, Mr. Rushdie!

Meet Sheila Heti at a bookstore near you! Sheila will discuss...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:57:00 -0400

Meet Sheila Heti at a bookstore near you! Sheila will discuss her latest book, HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?, a “Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Unlike any other novel I can think of.” (David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review)

Wed 6/26       BROOKLYN, NY       Greenlight w/ Kenneth Goldsmith
Thurs 6/27     ASHEVILLE, NC       Malaprop’s
Fri 6/28          MIAMI, FL                 Books & Books
Sat 6/29         NEW ORLEANS, LA Octavia Books
Mon 7/1         TULSA, OK                 Retro Den w/ Andrew Leland
Tues 7/2         AUSTIN, TX                Book People with Jill Meyers

The 1977 World Ocean Floor Panorama, based on 25 years of...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:58:00 -0400

The 1977 World Ocean Floor Panorama, based on 25 years of oceanographic research by Marie Tharp, badass lady scientist and the subject of Soundings, on sale July 3rd.

Our creative director, Henry Sene Yee, takes the best photos of...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:14:14 -0400

Our creative director, Henry Sene Yee, takes the best photos of the Flatiron Building.

"Libraries aren’t in the real world, after all. They’re places apart, sanctuaries of pure..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:28:25 -0400

“Libraries aren’t in the real world, after all. They’re places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought.”

- Paul Auster

Custom bike helmet modeled after Roberto Bolaño’s 2666....

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:28:26 -0400

Custom bike helmet modeled after Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

[via: The Paris Review]

Watch the trailer for the new Salinger documentary featuring...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:00:33 -0400

Watch the trailer for the new Salinger documentary featuring Joyce Maynard, Tom Wolfe, and many more.

PS: Don’t miss our September reissue of Maynard’s At Home in the World.

“Certainty is not necessarily a friend of sanity, although...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:37:00 -0400

“Certainty is not necessarily a friend of sanity, although it is often mistaken for it.”

—Philippa Perry, from How to Stay Sane

[via]

nprfreshair: Two-time winner of the Man Booker prize Hilary...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:16:39 -0400

nprfreshair:

Two-time winner of the Man Booker prize Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, speaks to Fresh Air about executions, 16th c. England, and feeling close to the past:

I’m one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. And as I say, in their conversation, everything was as if it happened yesterday. And the dead were discussed along with the living, and the difference didn’t really seem to matter. And I suppose this seeped into my viewpoint. Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they’d just gone into the next room.

Image via Th e Times

Last minute Father’s Day shopping for dad got you stumped?...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:40:00 -0400

Last minute Father’s Day shopping for dad got you stumped? We’ve got books from military history, mystery, to sports. Forgo that boring work tie and give pops something he’ll really enjoy!

The Day of Battle, by Rick Atkinson
In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome.

Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, this is narrative history of the first rank. With The Day of Battle, Atkinson has once again given us the definitive account of one of history’s most compelling military campaigns.

Blue Latitudes, by Tony Horwitz
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain’s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today’s Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook’s ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today.

The Nightmare, by Lars Kepler
A drowned young woman is discovered on an abandoned pleasure boat drifting by the Stockholm archipelago—strangely, her clothes are dry. The next day in Stockholm, a man turns up dead, hanging from a lamp hook inside his completely bare apartment—but how could he have hung himself with no furniture to climb upon? As Detective Inspector Joona Linna begins to piece together the two mysteries, he discovers that they are a mere prelude to a dizzying and dangerous course of events.

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte
Milo Burke—husband, father, development officer at a third-tier university—has just joined the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is relieved to get another chance from his former boss. All he has to do is reel in a potential donor who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. Exploring such themes as work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a hilarious tour de force from a writer who has already shown that the deepest fictions are often the funniest.

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
Tree of Smoke is the story of William “Skip” Sands, CIA—engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is “bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.”

Three and Out, by John U. Bacon
Three and Out tells the story of how college football’s most influential coach, Rich Rodriguez, took over the nation’s most successful program, only to produce three of the worst seasons in the University of Michigan’s celebrated history. Coach Rich Rodriguez granted author and journalist John U. Bacon unrestricted access to the Michigan Wolverines’ program. Bacon saw it all, from the meals and the meetings, to the practices and the games, to the sidelines and the locker rooms. Nothing and no one was off-limits. John U. Bacon’s Three and Out is the definitive account of a football marriage seemingly made in heaven that broke up after just three years, and exposes the best and the worst of college football.

Bookmarked: Pages Being Shared in the Picador Office Meyer’s...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:25:00 -0400

Bookmarked: Pages Being Shared in the Picador Office

Meyer’s goal was to make a comic that was equally translatable for sighted and blind people. Using a method similar to Braille, he embossed paper with circles of varying heights and sizes to represent different characters…. “People started creating a love story out of these circles in simple boxes,” he said. “It’s really fascinating.”

Madeline is reading this fascinating piece about a comic book for the blind.

Although Gabrielle doesn’t eat cheese, she appreciates this giant decoder wheel.

Emma is reading about Gitmo’s prison library, home to about 18,000 books. ”Books are screened out if they include too much profanity, anti-American or extremist themes, or ‘too much sex and violence,’” the chief librarian at Guantánamo Bay says. Somehow, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo made it through.

“[Elephants] are just like us but better than us.” Dame Daphne...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:47:19 -0400

“[Elephants] are just like us but better than us.”

Dame Daphne Sheldrick discusses orphaned elephants and the rise in ivory poaching in The Washington Post

"It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:38:14 -0400

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”

- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Summer’s in less than 10 days! Prepare for it by spending...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:02:27 -0400

Summer’s in less than 10 days! Prepare for it by spending some time on Michael Frayn’s private Greek island of Skios.

theparisreview: Artist Ekaterina Panikanova paints on old...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:20:41 -0400

theparisreview:

Artist Ekaterina Panikanova paints on old books. As you can see, the results are extraordinary.

It’s a beautiful day at the Flatiron Building.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:08:34 -0400

It’s a beautiful day at the Flatiron Building.

Just created and awesome: OpenDyslexic, a free, open-sourced...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:34:02 -0400

Just created and awesome: OpenDyslexic, a free, open-sourced font that can help people with dyslexia read a book more effectively.

(More info on GalleyCat.)

David Letterman’s Top 10 Bookstore Pick-Up Lines circa...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:16:00 -0400

David Letterman’s Top 10 Bookstore Pick-Up Lines circa 1990.

[via]

[via]

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:16:22 -0400

[via]

Bookish street promotion spotted in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:27:00 -0400

Bookish street promotion spotted in Bushwick, Brooklyn.