Meredith Hall's Without a Map continues to resonate with readers. A Q&A with homeschooling expert Robert Kunzman addresses some of the criticism his book has received from conservative bloggers. Kathryn Joyce uncovers the dark side of Christian adoption agencies. The... Read more →
Poverty and homelessness do not mean that books are pushed aside: a love of reading endures in the face of adversity. Read more →
What does a Supreme Court Case about animal cruelty have to do with booksellers? Chris Finan explains the free speech issues at stake in U.S. v. Stevens. Read more →
We invite Da Capo press author and Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie to talk about his new book, The Ride. Read more →
The eco-site Ideal Bite will be featuring Fred Pearce in August. Sign up for their book club and read along... Read more →
For Father's Day, the author of The Daddy Shift picks some of his favorite kids books that feature Dads center stage. Read more →
A statement regarding recent cancellations of events featuring Beacon Press author Bill Ayers. Read more →
Beacon Press Assistant Editor Alexis Rizzuto reflects on a recent visit to Boston Arts Academy. Read more →
Beacon Press sales assistant Sara Hatch talks about her beloved e-book reader. Read more →
Today’s post is from Reshma Melwani, Beacon’s Foreign Rights assistant. Since joining Beacon a little over a year ago, Reshma has overseen countless translation deals; this post explores some of her more inspiring deals and their significance in today’s world. Read more →
The 90th anniversary of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 and five years after the publication of his book about the disaster, Dark Tide, Stephen Puleo talks about the enduring popularity of the book. Read more →
Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift, forthcoming from Beacon Press in spring 2009. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic. One night at dinner... Read more →
"The Poet Goes to Indiana" by Mary Oliver was featured on the Writer's Almanac recently. Bill Ayers was interviewed by the Washington Post for this piece that ran that day after the election—the New Yorker's David Remnick was there, too.... Read more →
Studs Terkel passed away last week at the age of 96. Rick Ayers shares some of his memories of the great oral historian. Read more →
Scott Horton, in his always excellent blog at Harpers, skewers the "New McCarthyism" in a defense of Rashid Khalidi. More commentary in support of Khalidi, a respected scholar at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Sowing Crisis: The Cold... Read more →
I am standing in the exam room, in the Women's Health Center, listening to the rapid heartbeat of a four-month-old fetus on a Doppler. The patient, Carey McDonald, 17, a slim blond cheerleader, is alone today. Sometimes her mother, a single waitress, comes with her. The father of the baby, a star football player on the hometown team, denies paternity. "But it's his!" Carey told me. "It is! He's the only boy I've ever been with and even that was only two times." Carey and her mom will raise this baby together. Read more →
The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment is "too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." Read more →
Some people will yawn at hearing that Saturday was the beginning of the 27th Annual Banned Books Week. The story is the same every year, isn't it? Hundreds of titles are challenged in schools and libraries around the country. In 2007, the number was 420. This is fewer than the year before, but the number has fluctuated widely since the launch of Banned Books Week in 1982. The average is around 500. Read more →
In the New York Times Magazine last weekend, David Gessner, author of Soaring With Fidel, weighed the pros and cons of teaching and writing, and teaching writing. Salon talks with Carmine Sarracino about our porn-saturated culture. Sarracino is co-author of... Read more →
I'm proud to note that Beacon Broadside is celebrating its first birthday this week—what a milestone. All our metrics are strong—measures I didn't even know existed a year ago but which I now follow avidly. Thanks to a dedicated and very talented blog editor, Jessie Bennett, and especially to a tremendously creative and generous list of house authors and friends, we have a very deep archive of posts on almost any subject of interest to Americans who are drawing breath in the 21st century. This fall also happens to mark my 32nd year in book publishing, and my 13th as director of Beacon. I think I value the blog so much because it is so radically different from anything I could imagine back when I was banging out letters to authors on a Selectric, with white-out smudges betraying my all-too-frequent typos. Read more →