As we're wrapping up our time talking about Carl Honore's "In Praise of Slowness", Arianna's first pick for the Huffington Post book club, I'm thinking about the two lives I lead--one as a book editor at Penguin and the other as the Books editor at HuffPost--and how my concept of...

Maybe it's because I'm in publishing, maybe it's because I love books, or maybe I'm just nosy, but when someone sitting near me in public is reading, I want to know what they're reading, why they're reading it, and why they decided to read it on the subway, at the...

To My Dear Colleagues in Publishing,

I know many of you are looking at this Books section and wondering how the hell you are going to make any noise for your titles considering there's so much on the page -- videos, slide shows, reviews, link outs, splashes all of it...

I had a Google Alert set so that I wouldn't miss a beat. I wanted to be able to call Jack Macrae the second the news came through about Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's novel of Cromwell's England that just won the Booker. Who's Jack? Mantel's American publisher. Why should anyone...

This month, we're celebrating Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness and throughout The Huffington Post you'll have a chance to see how others are embracing the Slow Movement, of which Carl is the godfather. About twenty years ago, I nearly burned myself out, when a kindly shrink and a...

I have been in publishing my entire working life -- not because I planned it, but because when looking through internship programs while in college at Barnard (a really long time ago) I saw an opening with a literary agency. I had no idea what a literary agent did, but...

The Lipstick Indicator

Dear Barack,

It's 9/11 and I don't feel like writing about lipstick but I'm depressed by the mood in New York and I'm depressed as I lifelong Democrat by the strong likelihood that once again, we are going to lose the White House.
When you were...

“I used to sit outside on the front doorstep while your father screamed in his crib,” my grandmother told me. “Every day I sat out there, or I sat on the couch, covering my ears and eating chocolates. Later, when he stopped crying or I could stand it, I would...