WSJ book reviews

The Seattle Times reports that the Wall Street Journal will be adding a weekly book review section to it's Saturday edition. This is good news indeed, insofar as most papers are cutting or have cut their book coverage. With all the books being published every day, on paper or electronically or who knows how, more than ever we need help finding the good ones (and avoiding the stinkers).

George Bernard Shaw online

The Guardian reports that a treasure trove of photos of and by GBS will be coming online. I had no idea how the great playwright had died: 'The Dublin-born writer died aged 94 in 1950 when he fell out of an apple tree at his home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, having got fed up with waiting for the gardener to prune a rotten branch. He left the house, Shaw's Corner, and its contents to the National Trust complete with an enormous photographic collection of more than 20,000 prints, negatives and glass plates.' More...

A nice free Alexander McCall Smith book

Starting Sept 13, you can get daily installments of McCall Smith's new Corduroy Mansions, either print or audio. Sounds like a good deal to me. Here's all the information.

How to open a new book

Okay, you can't do this on your Kindle. But a tip of the hat to BoingBoing for showing us this illustration.

Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future

In 1964, author Clarke nailed it, although his ideas on cities disappearing may not be exactly right. Still, how many science fiction authors ever predict so much so well? Check out the video at Publishing Perspectives.

This year's Hugo winners

And the nominees as well, courtesy of John Scalzi's Whatever blog. List.

John Le Carre excerpt

From the new book, Our Kind of Traitor. It's been getting very strong reviews, and it's nice to get a little taste of a master. The excerpt is here.