'Rules of the Store' at Capitol Hill Books
"I love this work, but can find it exasperating at times. In the store, people leave books wherever they feel like, so I will find Ulysses God knows where. And then, there are the people who argue about prices and don't understand inflation. I charge less than half price for a book, but if it cost $10 in 1980, it costs more now. I can't take you in a time machine back to when it was $10. Sometimes I feel like I have to teach these people basic economics.
"And then, there are the rules of the store. First, you can only get in when it is open. Second, no cell phones. This is a book store and not a phone booth. Third, there are words and phrases that you can't use in my store: like, oh my God, neat, sweet, have a good one, that's a good question, totally, whatever, perfect, Kindle or Amazon. These words give me brain damage. I'm serious. When people use them in here, I tell them to get a thesaurus and stop being so mentally lame."
A sign of the times at Misty Valley Books, Chester, Vt.
Amazon, which is hiring hundreds of new full-time staff at fulfillment centers in Carlisle and Lewisberry, Pa., used its press release yesterday about the hirings to drive home the point that states that don't seek to have it collect sales tax will be rewarded. 
Books-A-Million has tentatively scheduled the opening of its 
The butler did it. A new study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of the University of California, San Diego, indicates that 
USA Today featured a list of the 
"We all know that you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can surely judge people by the covers of their books," Brian Viner wrote in a Telegraph piece chronicling his disappointing holiday in Turkey, "where around the hotel swimming-pool my wife and I were able to make only a limited series of snap judgments about our fellow Brits, owing to the number of electronic books being read behind maddeningly unrevealing black cases. It simply hadn't occurred to me, until we arrived at the pool on our first morning, that I was about to lose 
EW also offered sample tracks from the forthcoming compilation 
Claudia H. Long grew up in Mexico City, graduated from Harvard University and practices law in Northern California. She wrote her senior thesis on The Feminism of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and remains a lifelong fan of the poet and her work. Josefina's Sin (Atria, August 9, 2011) tells the story of a sheltered land-owner's wife in late 17th-century Mexico, who leaves everything she knows and loves to study with Sor Juana. But she doesn't only learn about poetry, she discovers the many shades and meanings of love, desire and the terrors of the Inquisition, while she navigates the treacherous waters of the Mexican vice-royal court.
Your top five authors: 
On August 31, 1997, in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, a speeding Mercedes crashed into a pillar, killing two of the four passengers instantly and seriously injuring the other two. The third passenger died four hours later; the fourth was in a coma for some time. These are the bare facts of what took place the night that Dodi Fayed and the driver, Henri Paul, were killed, Princess Diana died shortly thereafter and Trevor Rees-Jones, Dodi's bodyguard, lay in a coma.
But this week Philip Levine was named the poet laureate of the U.S. and I'm excited. Levine's work matters to me. I've read him for a long time. When I heard the news of his appointment, my first thoughts were not about the Library of Congress or more poetry-in-the-schools initiatives. They were about work and reading, and how those two words became the essence of my life, made me, inevitably, one of Levine's readers.