Like the five summers before it, the summer of 2019 will go into the record books as the hottest summer on record, and even at summer’s end in the Northern Hemisphere, large swaths of the United States are still engulfed in a heat that hasn’t abated in weeks. But even so, here in New England […]

Well, it’s official.  In early August, James Daunt and his UK hedge fund Elliott Advisors handed over an enormous lump sum of money and completed the purchase of Barnes & Noble, the last giant retail bookstore chain in the United States. Daunt, already the CEO of Waterstones in Britain, paid $683 million and took ownership […]

Every publishing season, they appear in droves: well-designed and spottily-edited novels with broad-shouldered men and leather-jacketed women on their covers, with titles like “The [Something-Something] Gambit” or “The [So-and-So] Protocol” or “The [What-Have-You] Legacy.”

London odds-makers and bet takers were all in a flurry in July, and the subject of their agitation wasn’t the winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the estimates on whether a peroxide-blond oaf would become the next Prime Minister – no, all the betting action was about ​books​.

When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens died in July at what can honestly be called the ripe old age of 99, he’d been retired from the highest court in the land for nearly a decade.