In the Margin
September 14, 2009

Welcome

Welcome to the new Barnes & Noble Review. We’re glad to celebrate our second anniversary with a refreshed design and a number of added functions and features.  For a start, our new homepage allows us to display more links to the rich array of good writing supplied by our reviewers, columnists, and other contributors.

In addition, you can now search the Review’s content and, once you sign in with your Barnes & Noble user name and password, comment upon what you read here. We look forward to hearing from you.

Two new features debut today as well: Daybook, written by our Newfoundland correspondent Steve King, offers a learned and witty daily dose of literary history, while In the Margin, the blog you’re reading now, will provide a forum for the Review’s editors (that would be me and Managing Editor Bill Tipper) and friends to comment on bookish business and other matters.

Next week, we’ll launch a special blog devoted to the National Book Foundation’s Best of the National Book Award Fiction contest. And very soon, Sarah Weinman will be joining our regular columnists -- Brooke Allen, Paul DiFilippo, Michael Dirda, A. C. Grayling, Eloisa James, and Ward Sutton -- with a mystery feature called The Criminalist.

Of course, we have a marvelous set of daily reviews lined up through the Fall, beginning with today’s fine appreciation, by Pete Hamill, of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel. We hope you’ll check in every day, subscribe to our RSS feed, and, when the spirit moves you, sign in and tell us what you think.

-James Mustich, Editor-in-Chief

Comments
by Cheryl_J on 09-14-2009 05:35 AM
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Wow - This  is GREAT!

by Gothenberg on 09-14-2009 06:12 AM
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Nice  - I like what you have done with the place.  Congrats!

Daybook

May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola,…

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Previously in Daybook
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The Long List
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Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

When a job at a French ad agency landed in his lap, novelist Rosecrans Baldwin had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of living la vie Parisienne. And though cold réalité  -- in the form of financial struggles and an office culture where his rudimentary Francais didn't quite cut the mustard -- intruded, the result was a more mature take on the city of his fantasies, flaws included.

Why Cats Land on Their Feet

The feline acrobatics and other mysteries of everyday physics that Mark Levi explores in this charming book are just the beginning. A fun and enlightening workout for your gray matter.

Dead Men

Scott's doomed Antartic expedition and the haunting mysteries surrounding its failure lead to obsession in Richard Pierce's debut novel. As painter Birdie Bowers pursues her fascination with the explorer and his death, she risks both her body and her heart for answers.