Quoted: The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

Quoted: Phaidon Press is the world's leading publisher of books on the visual arts

Quoted:too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither;..

Quoted: On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace,

Quoted: These are the books that are disappointing only because they have to end.

Funny stuff :-)

THREE-FOR-A-DOLLAR FEEDER FISH: Steve Almond
Has sex once a month with fans he meets through MySpace. Receives up to three e-mails a day from a mix of MFA students at community colleges, Centipedes in the Darkness wanting blurbs, and 14-year-old girls who have lived their entire lives in gated communities. Will not be forgotten easily even after he is dead and his books are out of print because of how easy it is to talk shit about him...

USED HONDA CIVIC IN "GREAT" CONDITION: Jonathan Franzen/ Rick Moody/David Foster Wallace
Published novels at first, then got distracted and published nonfiction books, story collections, essay collections, and other things that made them less powerful. Also held back by their inability to write about the Holocaust, genocide in Africa, racism, or the immigrant experience;

Quoted: The Book Review picks the best works from the last year.

I've been curious about E-ink. Amazon's product doesn't look as slick as Sony's reader but it does have a larger book database[and the free wireless].

Quoted: The screen uses the same astonishing E Ink technology that Sony’s Reader uses. It looks like black ink on light gray paper: no backlight, no glare, no eyestrain — and no need to turn it off, ever.That’s because E Ink draws power only when you turn a page. At that point, millions of particles are drawn into a pattern of letters (or four-shade gray-scale images) by a brief electronic charge — and there they can stay forever, even if you take the battery out. You don’t turn this thing off; you just set it down, like a book.

Quoted: The Kindle goes online using Sprint’s 3G cellular data network — the same service that costs $60 a month for corporate laptop luggers. The Kindle’s price tag stings less when you realize that Amazon is going to pay your entire wireless tab. The Kindle store offers best-seller lists, Most Popular lists and a Search box. The catalog includes 90,000 books so far, including 101 of the 112 currently listed as New York Times best sellers.

Quoted: The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 3, 2006.

A useful list- with direct links to reviews. Includes works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.