How I wish Olga Wojtas had seven sisters! I would lock them in a tastefully appointed garrett and set them all to writing gloriously loony mystery novels. And I would publish these novels and put paid forever to the notion that Mssrs. Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde, et al. (not forgetting the Python boys) have a lock on inspired insanity. As it is, I’ll have to make do with Olga Wojtas on her lonesome, but that is hardly a hardship. Gentlemen, there’s a new sheriff in town, and she’s got a Scottish accent. Scottish? With a name like Olga...

If you look at the back of a novel published in, say, the 1980s—a good novel, I mean—you will almost certainly see a panoply of “blurbs,” publishing-speak for excerpts from reviews of the book. “A delightful entertainment,” the blurbs will say, or “Unexpectedly moving,” or “Drop what you’re doing and get a copy.” And the blurbs will be attributed to critics from newspapers and magazines around the country—if the writer was lucky, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly (and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Hartford Courant, the Tampa Tribune, perhaps, with a little less luck). Them...

We are so thrilled to be doing (almost) live events again. As card-carrying Book People, there’s nothing we like better than settling in for a long evening with a great book, but talking about books comes a close second. And for the past umpteen months, of course…that hasn’t really been possible. Enter the magic of the internet! On Thursday, November 18, at 7:00 p.m. EST, we are presenting our first VIRTUAL book event, featuring Alex Reeve, who thanks to the wonders of technology will be coming to us live from England. Alex writes the extraordinary Leo Stanhope series, about a young trans man who...

The truth is, I am very much of two minds about writing a celebration post. On the one hand, I am DEE-LIGHTED that we are able to provide books again to our Felonious Friends. We were tangled in the mother of technological snares, stuck like a sticky thing, and I was not at all sure that we could find a way out. But to paraphrase Margaret Mead, never doubt the ability of a small group of thoughtful, committed people to do extraordinary things. Which is a fancy way of saying that a bunch of folks worked hard to solve the...

We admit it: We’re stuck. Not between a rock and a hard place, but between their contemporary equivalents—one software system and another. In order to sell you books, we have to persuade these two systems to talk to each other, but right now, one is speaking English and the other….I’m thinking it’s 17th-century Pashto. We don’t want to invite you to order books, only to have to send you emails apologizing because those books are delayed…and delayed…and delayed, so for the moment, our website is out of the bookselling business.  However, we remain very much in the book publishing business; our books are most certainly still available elsewhere, and we want you to know...