A
    Amy Hertz

    Amy Hertz

    HuffPost Books Editor

  • 'A Dance With Dragons': My Love/Hate Relationship With George RR Martin's Series

    George R.R. Martin's fantasy series "A Song of Ice and Fire" came into my life when a friend recommended the books to me, shortly after the third volume in the saga, "A Storm of Swords," was published in 2000.

  • Library Cuts: UK Closures Ahead Of US, But Does Anyone Care?

    February 5, 2011 was Save Our Libraries Day in the UK, complete with interactive map to find the nearest protest. Additionally, not every publisher has made a decision over lending ebooks: HarperCollins had put a cap of 26 times for ebook lending.

  • PHOTOS Heroes Of Self-Publishing: The New Breed Of Indie Authors That Made It Big

    "I took the [road less] traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Yes, self-publishing for Amanda Hocking and John Locke was the road less traveled by and it did make all the difference. The story of self-publishing is the story of publishing in America and England. Ben Franklin and Tom Paine both did it, as you can see here .

  • WATCH Bristol Palin: Virginity Was 'Stolen'

    When her mother, Sarah Palin, was thrust into the spotlight as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, Bristol Palin had to come out with a secret, that she was about to be a teen mom. Bristol Palin doesn't accuse the father of her baby, Levi Johnston, of date rape, but does say she felt her virginity was stolen. In the book, she refers to Levi Johnston as the "gnat" who is constantly "spreading false accusations about our family." When asked how her son might react to this description of his father when he grows up, Palin is not concerned.

  • WATCH: Ray Nagin On Why He Self-Published 'Katrina's Secrets'

    "Katrina's Secrets" is former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's new book on what happened after the natural disaster and it was self-published through Amazon. President Bush and Governor Kathleen Blanco tied things up as well according to Nagin.

  • Apple Sued By New York Publisher Over Use Of ‘iBooks’

    Colby bought in 2006 and 2007 the assets of various entities owned by New York publisher Byron Preiss, who had published more than 1,000 hardcover and paperback books under the "ibooks" name starting in September 1999, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan today.

  • WATCH Barack Obama's Mother: The Woman We Know Nothing About

    Obama wrote a memoir about him, "Dreams from My Father." But the woman who gave birth to him, the white woman from Kansas we know almost nothing about. Janny Scott, author of "A Singular Woman" appeared on Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report to talk about her. Colbert tries to argue that she was a terrible mother because she left Barack with her parents during high school so that she could pursue graduate work in Indonesia.

  • Amazon To Price Kindle Under $100 By Christmas?

    Expect to see Amazon offering a Kindle for less than $100 by the end of the year. In a research note offered by Citigroup, analyst Mark Mahaney predicted that Amazon's e-reader is so successful that the company will be able to lower the price by the end of the year. Noting that "eBooks have clearly reached critical mass" for Amazon, Mahaney says, "We believe that industry-wide, eBooks will surpass Print books in terms of sales within 2-3 years," adding that Kindle sales are up 200% in 2011 so far compared with the same period last year.

  • Borders Books: 51 Stores That May Close If A Deal Isn't Struck Soon

    Borders Group Inc. on Thursday asked the bankruptcy court's permission to close the following 51 stores in order to satisfy a condition of its bankruptcy financing. Borders says it doesn't actually want to close the stores because that could make it impossible to sell them. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Philip Roth Wins Man Booker Prize, Judge Quits In Protest (POLL)

    Philip Roth was awarded The Man Booker Prize , it was announced this morning on the prize's website. The author, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, was named winner of the Man Booker International at the Sydney Writers' Festival today, beating a stellar, if eclectic, shortlist.

  • 20 Unpublished Anthony Burgess Stories Found

    At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born. The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993.

  • The New York Review Of Books Reviews Self-Published Book

    "Dear Marcus" is a self-published first book by someone with no connection to New York publishing. At the age of twelve its author, Jerry McGill, was shot in the back in Manhattan's East Village on New Year's Day by someone he never saw.

  • Jonathan Franzen: I Keep Pot In My Freezer

    Jonathan Franzen keeps marijuana in his freezer, author Elif Batuman writes in The Guardian. Batuman, a National Book Critics Circle finalist and the author of "The Posessed," writes that while in New York around NBCC ceremonies, she attended a dinner thrown by her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for its three NBCC finalists: Damon Searles, Jonathan Franzen and herself. When talk between her and her agent turned to who at the dinner might have marijuana, they agreed that Franzen was the most likely candidate.

  • WATCH: James B. Stewart, 'Tangled Webs': How American Society Is Drowning In Lies

    What "Tangled Webs" examines is people at the pinnacle of their professions--Martha Stewart, Barry Bonds, Scooter Libby, people from Wall Street right up to the White House--"brazenly lying." They're role models, and their behavior trickles down to society. "Why do they lie," asks Stewart? Stewart makes the case that the judicial system is breaking down when oaths mean nothing and prosecutors are examining people for their skill at lying, instead of whether or not they are lying.

  • Mortenson's 'Three Cups Of Tea' Under fire from ‘60 Minutes': Author Denies Allegations

    Bestselling author Greg Mortenson has issued a written response to a "60 Minutes" report calling into question his philanthropic practices and his experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mortenson chronicled those experiences in the books "Three Cups of Tea" and "Stones Into Schools" and leads the Central Asia Institute, an international charity that supports schools in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  • Libraries Have Become Major Job Resource Centers And Heroes Of Battling Censorship (PHOTOS)

    It's National Library Week and The American Library Association has published its report on the State of American Libraries. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Libraries, bookstores and individuals nationwide continue to battle censorship, and thousands of people read from banned or challenged books during Banned Books Week (Sept. 25-Oct. 2, 2010).

  • WATCH: 600 Year Old Book Found In Sandy, Utah

    Appraiser Ken Sanders says it's the find of his career: a copy of "The Nuremberg Chronicle," published as a companion to The Gutenberg Bible, in 1494. It is one of the world's oldest printed books. Sanders says he hasn't seen anything like it outside of museums, and never expected to find something like it in Sandy, Utah.

  • Piecing Together A Posthumous David Foster Wallace Novel

    In his office at Little Brown, where he is executive vice president and publisher, Michael Pietsch still has the tower of a manuscript and the handwritten journals and notebooks he carried out of David Foster Wallace's studio, in a duffel and two Trader Joe's bags, after Wallace killed himself in September 2008.

  • Great Books Don't Have To Be Bad Movies

    In the course of their famous book-length interview, François Truffaut once asked Alfred Hitchcock about his approach to literary adaptation, and Hitch's response was as magisterial, worldly and mischievous as one would expect: "What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds.

  • Flavorwire: Porn Star Memoirs

    With the release of Neü Sex by Sasha Grey, we decided to do a roundup of porn stars and directors who have written memoirs. There's the "now I hate porn and was exploited" memoir, the "insider view of the industry" memoir, and the how-to guide for aspiring porn stars.