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    Sammy Perlmutter

    Sammy Perlmutter

    Contributor

  • Library Stripped Completely Bare By Residents

    Last week, the Stony Stratford library, in the district of Milton Keynes, England, experienced a run. As in "a run on the library," in which more than a thousand Stony Stratford residents made their way to the red-brick building, scoured the shelves for their allotment of fifteen titles, swiped their library cards, and left the building completely bare of books. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • How Is A 27-Year-Old-French Kid Selling 3 Million eBooks A Month?

    Gardeur co-founded his company Feedbooks --- a cloud publishing and distribution service for e-books --- during the summer of 2007 when he was in his last year of computer science engineering school. Three and a half years later, Feedbooks distributes some three million e-books each month to a growing community of readers on multiple platforms, in the US and France, and is looking to add other major European markets in the near term.

  • Barbara Walters Disputes Ron Reagan's Book Claims About Father's Mental State

    In Ron Reagan Jr.'s new book, "My Father at 100," he says his father, President Ronald Reagan, exhibited signs of mental lapse during the end of his first term in office. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Rick Bass's 'Danger'

    All writers can learn to avoid some common technical pitfalls, but the "danger" Bass warns about is that writing threatens to consume all available time and energy and that experience makes the work increasingly more difficult as ambition and risk of failure increase. Beginning writers look for rules, guidelines, clever sayings that can be posted on a mirror, and these things are important, or at least they were for me.

  • Harry Potter Plagiarism Case Thrown Out Of U.S. Court

    The estate of late author Adrian Jacobs had said that the plot of the book, the fourth of seven in the wildly successful series that has been turned into a multi-billion-dollar film franchise, copied parts of the plot of his book "Willy the Wizard," including a wizard contest, and that Rowling borrowed the idea of wizards traveling on trains. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

  • 'Huck Finn' Has Been Expurgated

    Since news broke that a new edition of Mark Twain's classic book "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" would be published next month with every instance of the N-word replaced by "slave," a horde of readers, scholars and concerned people have spoken in outrage. In 1818 American Thomas Bowdler published a series of Shakespeare translations, which he edited heavily for content that he considered offensive. Since then, the act of editing or removing offensive content has been deemed "bowdlerizing" and it has taken place many times.

  • 'India Calling': The New 'Land Of Opportunity'?

    Writer Anand Giridharadas grew up in America, but it was in India -- the country that his parents left -- where he went to look for hope. "India has become -- in a way that it has not been -- a land of opportunity for millions and millions and millions of people," he says. In his book, India Calling, Giridharadas describes how India's growing economy is creating growing opportunity -- what many might recognize as American-style chances to get ahead.

  • WATCH: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kenny Chesney

    Since even before The Beatles hit the pop charts with their 1966 song "Paperback Writer," music about writers, books, letters and all other things literary have been a part of the cultural landscape. With influences ranging from Dr. Seuss to George Orwell, and music from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kenny Chesney, books have appeared in music across the map.

  • The Poser And The (Former) Planet Pluto

    "How I Killed Pluto" is a strange artifact, an unlikely hybrid of Dennis Overbye's "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos" and Anne Lamott's "Operating Instructions." It's not a book about the former ninth planet -- or even planetary astronomy -- lightly salted with Brown's family life.

  • WATCH: Michio Kaku Warns 5 Cities Of Enormous Pending Earthquakes

    Physicist and author of "Physics of the Future" Michio Kaku warned world citizens this morning on Good Morning America about the pending threat of enormous earthquakes. "In our life time, we could very well see one of these cities destroyed," Kaku said. Kaku pointed to changes in the physical structures of human civilization, and how the new composure poses many risks.

  • Melville Dickinson Mashup

    An MIT faculty member partnered with a poet to publish a so-called poetry generator, which uses language from the work of Emily Dickinson and Melville's "Moby-Dick." The project, dubbed "Sea and Spar Between," allows users to browse a vast body of words used by both Dickinson and Meville to form new stanzas of poetry. "Sea and Spar Between is a poetry generator which defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion.

  • McChrystal Memoir Coming 2012

    Four star General Stanley A. McChrystal retired from his post as commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and the U.S. army after criticizing Vice President Joe Biden and other American officials in a highly publicized Rolling Stone article this summer. In 2012 the world will be able to hear more of McChrystal's opinions in the form of a book, as Portfolio/ Penguin has acquired the memoir of the former military official. "Amidst all the media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," commented Mr. Zackheim, "few people know who General Stan McChrystal really is and what he has accomplished.

  • Books To Read Before They're Movies

    To mark the Winter solstice and a new season, I'm giving you guys a brand-new list for your shelf with even more titles that you'll be seeing on the big screen. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Why Mark Twain Should Have Burned His Letters

    One of the nation's leading public intellectuals, Judt was inspired by historian Jonathan Spence's 1984 book, "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci." In that book, Spencer considers the work of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China whose pièce de résistance was his 1596 "Treatise on Mnemonic Arts." Ricci's advice involved the spatial association of words and images -- by filling a "Memory Palace" with things to remember, literally room by room, you might stand a chance of holding on to them.

  • No Escape: Getting Out Of The Gulag

    Galina, granddaughter of a Bolshoi ballet ballerina exiled to the gulag, is willing to try almost anything to reclaim her grandmother's fame and return to Moscow. GALINA IVANOVNA'S grandmother was the luminary of the labor camp, while our grandmothers were her audience.

  • Poetry And Politics: What Role Should Poetry Play?

    Last week's images of mounted policemen charging the protesters around Parliament Square evoked multiple memories: the poll tax riots in John Major's 90s; the angry young of Brixton and Toxteth in Thatcher's 80s; even, for the historically minded, the Peterloo massacre in 1819, where magistrates sent in cavalry to disperse a crowd of over 60,000 who had gathered to protest for political reform.

  • Best Places To Get Free eBooks

    Since over a year ago free eBooks  have been a hot topic in the publishing market. Last week, however, The Washington Post reported that Amazon has been charging users for books they could get for free on alternate sites, including Project Gutenberg. The titles in question aren't just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg.

  • Grace Krilanovich

    The 5 Under 35 had had our own event, two days prior at the powerHouse Arena in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. The National Book Foundation's annual reading and party, featuring five authors under the age of 35, is now in its fifth year and serves as a nice, festive kick-off for National Book Week -- and, if you're one of the authors, it is also a dazzling, nerve-wracking entree into a national stage. With a huge crowd full of formidable book people -- including our selecting authors, past National Book Award awardees and finalists -- the air was thick with the implicit notion that, once each had introduced us in glowing terms, singing our praises in a genuinely awe-inspiring way, we would then have to get up there and deliver the goods, i.e., read the words that all this fanfare was geared around.

  • Michiko Kakutani Writes Review As Brian The Dog From 'Family Guy'

    You know, the talking dog from "Family Guy": best-selling author, actor, television writer, movie director, song-and-dance ace, civil rights crusader and, yes, animal companion. Because of my sterling literary credentials, I've been asked to review this British pooch's new memoir: "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe," ghosted by this novelist guy Andrew O'Hagan.

  • WATCH: Just How Revolutionary Is Google eBooks?

    Google launched its foray into the publishing market today with Google eBooks, a comprehensive online shopping service that allows users to purchase digital books and then read them across multiple platforms, such as the Nook, iPad and personal computer. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks--everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud.