J
    Jessie Kunhardt

    Jessie Kunhardt

    HuffPost Books Intern

  • Why Do Novelists Hate Being Interviewed?

    "I Don't Want to Talk About It." That was on the card Don DeLillo handed me in Athens after I crossed seven time zones to interview him back in 1979. In "Mao II," about another writer that people want to talk with, DeLillo has a character say, "The interviewers are writing novels." What I've noticed recently is that the novelists are writing novels about interviewers, and I'm wondering what this trend says about novelists and their readers.

  • Glenn Beck, Stephen King Exchange Brutal Insults (VIDEO)

    Glenn Beck and Stephen King have both written bestselling books, but the similarities stop there. Appearing on Bill O'Reilly's show last night, Glenn Beck responded to King's comments in his Entertainment Weekly column that Beck is like an "urban nut cake," a crazy person who believes that the world is going to end.

  • 'Charlie St. Cloud' Author On His Journey From NBC Producer To Fiction Writer (VIDEO)

    Before "Charlie St. Cloud" became a summer blockbuster starring Zac Efron, it was a novel written by former NBC producer and Good Morning America executive producer Ben Sherwood. Sherwood spoke about his transition from producer to novelist to Diane Sawyer on her "World News Conversation." The way he described it, the success of his novel was based largely on luck, and on its universal themes of love and loss.

  • Anne Rice On Her Decision To Quit Christianity (VIDEO)

    Anne Rice announced on her Facebook page last week that she has decided to quit Christianity. Rice addressed some of the major issues that turned her away from her religion, including the church's anti-gay, anti-feminist, and anti-abortion beliefs. Rice acknowledged that it was very difficult to stand behind an anti-gay church when her son, Christopher, is gay, but she denied that the decision was because of him, explaining that she had been aware of gay issues since long before he came out.

  • Amazon: We Have 70-80 Percent Of eBook Market

    Recently, I sat down with Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle, to get a sneak peek at the new Kindles and discuss e-books and the Kindle business in general. Naturally, a good portion of the conversation centered on the design and features of Amazon's new e-readers, which you can read about here. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Indie Bookstores Rising: New York Mag Gets Up Close And Personal With New York City's Independents

    New York Magazine has a great feature in its Books section today celebrating the independent bookstores of New York City. It consists of six different articles and an introductory piece -- all of which, put together, paint a comprehensive and fascinating portrait of the state of indie bookstore culture in New York today. One of the new stores featured is the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn (a HuffPost Books favorite), which gave readers a great opportunity to take a look at its books for the year, showing an impressive overall profit of over $11,000.

  • Raymond Scott, Quirky Antiques Dealer, Jailed For Smuggling Shakespeare

    Last month, a jury cleared Raymond Scott, 53, of stealing the First Folio but found him guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from Britain. Scott was arrested after he took the 1623 volume to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. two years ago and asked to have it authenticated. Experts there alerted police, who say the folio was stolen from a display case at Durham University in northern England in 1998.

  • 'Eat Pray Love' Is Just The Latest: 15 Great Movies Where Authors Are The Stars (PHOTOS)

    Here, we've collected some of the best movies that have authors (that's book writers -- we're not including the legions of movies about journalists or screenwriters here) as their main characters. Which are your favorites?

  • Anne Rice: 'I Quit Being A Christian'

    Anne Rice, the bestselling novelist most popularly known for "Interview with the Vampire" and her other creepy vampire novels, announced on Wednesday via Facebook that she has officially renounced Christianity.

  • The Curveball Of Karl Rove

    Karl Rove grew up in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. As a student at the University of Utah he joined the College Republicans. Whatever the nature of Rove's contact with Segretti, the fate of Nixon's advisers, campaign organizers, and tricksters doubtless formed a subject of meditation for him in the years 2004--2006, when he found himself threatened with indictment by a special prosecutor.

  • Hemingway Look-Alike Contest Winner: 'I Enjoy Women, I Fish And I Drink, But I Don't Write'

    A white-bearded 64-year-old Florida man won this year's Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, an event in Key West's annual Hemingway Days festival that ended Sunday. Charles Bicht, of Vero Beach, triumphed over 123 other entrants in the late Saturday night competition, a highlight of the annual celebration that honors the literary giant who lived and wrote in Key West throughout the 1930s. "I've been looking forward to this for 12 years," said Bicht, who credited his win to perseverance after 11 unsuccessful attempts.

  • Bret Easton Ellis On 'Imperial Bedrooms' And Why Sex Is The Ultimate Motivator (VIDEO)

    Bret Easton Ellis, author of "American Psycho," has a new book out this summer called "Imperial Bedrooms" -- a follow-up to his 1985 bestseller "Less Than Zero." On "Morning Joe" this morning, Easton Ellis talked about the differences between the two books. "Less Than Zero" was first published when Easton Ellis was only 21, he said -- he had been working on it for a college class, and his teacher, Joe McGinniss, sent it to his agent and publisher. The book generated some mixed feelings, Easton Ellis said, but the younger editors in the publishing house championed it, while the "old school" editors said things like, "My God, if we publish a book like this, publishing is over." The book spread in popularity largely by word of mouth, and became a bestseller months after it was published.

  • Bookstore Bingo: 13 Of The Most Ridiculous Things Overheard In Bookstores (PHOTOS)

    As in any retail job, people who work in bookstores have to deal with their fair share of strange comments from customers on a daily basis. Twitter user @JennIRL pointed out how crazy bookstore customers can be a few weeks ago when she started a hashtag on called #bookstorebingo, inspired by an article at the book blogShelf Awareness about a bookseller's husband who filled in for her and came back with a list of all the insane questions customers had asked him. The #bookstorebingo hashtag has exploded on Twitter since then.

  • Virginia Prison Sued For Banning Book About How To Sue Prisons

    National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued state Department of Corrections Director Gene Johnson, officials at Coffeewood Correctional Center and members of the department's Publication Review Committee on Wednesday in federal court in Charlottesville. The groups claim the officials violated their First Amendment and due process rights when they restricted inmates' access to their book "Jailhouse Lawyer's Handbook." The book is a how-to guide to filing lawsuits concerning mistreatment or poor prison conditions. Prison officials would not comment on the lawsuit.

  • Jane Green, 'Queen Of Chick Lit,' On Being A 'Lazy Friend' (VIDEO)

    Jane Green, the so-called "queen of chick lit" was on Good Morning America this morning to talk about her new book, "Promises to Keep." Green explained that her most recent book is not autobiographical, but it is inspired by her friend who died of breast cancer, and deals with the relationships between women when cancer comes between them. Green said that this experience with her friend taught her what friendship was really about, and made her realize that she had been a "lazy friend." "What friendship actually requires are acts of love," she said.

  • 13 Great Books For Gay Teens (PHOTOS)

    A few weeks ago, we got some heartening news: books written for and about gay teens have exploded in popularity in recent years. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

  • 'I Write Like' Sweeps The Web: Which Famous Author Do You Write Like?

    For the past few days, the web has been buzzing about a new website called I Write Like that will analyze your writing and tell you which famous author you write like. The site encourages anyone to paste in a few paragraphs from a blog, term paper, book, or anything else, and it will tell you whether you're a James Joyce or a Dan Brown. The funniest result so far must be what Margaret Atwood got when she tried out the tool.

  • Google Ancient Places: Google Books And Google Earth Combine For Research Resource

    A Google-backed research project is to map out the relationship between location and literature, visualising works related to a specific era or place using Google Earth. A joint project between the Open University, the University of Southampton and the University of California at Berkeley, Google Ancient Places will let users search for books related to specific geographic location during a particular time period, which are then visualised on Google Earth or Google Maps.

  • Is 'Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire' A Rip-Off Of 'Willy The Wizard'? Author's Estate Sues Scholastic

    The lawsuit, to be filed in a federal court in New York, claims that the company's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is "substantially similar" to Jacob's 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, a book largely unknown before last year. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Apple Censorship: From The 'Kama Sutra' To 'Ulysses,' 9 Books And Book Apps That Apple Has Censored Or Rejected (PHOTOS)

    As Apple has gotten the chance to control more and more content with its ever-expanding app store the popular company has shown itself to be somewhat tyrannical and more than a little prudish when it comes to censorship. Books and book apps have gotten caught up in the storm of arbitrary rejections and strange censorship as Apple decides which make the cut into the apparently exclusive app store and iBookstore. How many more book apps (that aren't porn) are being censored by Apple that we don't know about?