Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to [...]

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An interesting article by Rachel Donadio will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, on the practice of blurbing — that is, authors (generally best-selling ones who, as the saying goes, Need No Introduction) providing capsule reviews to appear on the back covers and jacket flaps of books by authors who, well, generally need [...]

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The author with the tongue-rolling moniker Doreen Orion has come up with a trailer for her new giant-bus travelogue Queen of the Road:

As the title of this RAMH post implies, this is why we read certain travelogues rather than writing them ourselves.

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One of the hardest — yet most important — questions an author often has to answer about his work is the one asked by this entry’s title.
Now, it’s not hard at all to answer, for many authors and even more books. When you walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you browse Amazon, it’s [...]

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Not really. But the new Book Roast site (also linked permanently over there at the right, under the Je Ne Sais Quoi… category) promises to be not only a generous labor of love, but an audacious experiment in book and author publicity.
Here’s the idea: Each week, for five days Every day during the last week [...]

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One of my little… well, I hesitate to call it a fetish. Doesn’t have the same level of intensity. (Er, or so I imagine.)… Anyway, one of my almost unconscious preoccupations is to notice product packages. All kinds of packages: breakfast foods; video games; aspirin bottles; gift wrap; so on and so forth.
Of course the [...]

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