Last month, a large used book collection and distribution company suddenly went out of business, leaving a hole in the local used book ecosystem. In this episode, we follow that story into the modern world of used book-selling.
In 1975, Truman Capote published a short story in Esquire magazine that led a New York socialite to commit suicide and the fallout effectively ended Capote's literary career. This is the story of the story, "La Cote Basque 1965."
Last fall, a woman with no prior political experience decided to run for city commission in her small college-town. So she went to the library, checked out a book called How to Win a Local Election. And she did. This is her story and the story of the book that helped her win.
In a shocking development, the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded. In this episode, we explore what happened, how it happened, and what might happen still.
The story of the strange 11-day disappearance of Agatha Christie: what did happen, what didn't happen, and what might have happened.
Last summer, an unknown book came out of nowhere to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list ...
In this episode, the story of Merriam-Webster's Third Edition, and fight about language it caused.
In this first episode of season 2 of Annotated, the story of how Shakespeare was saved for posterity by two of his friends and a cagey publisher.
In this episode, an investigation of the Oxford comma that starts, improbably, with a love story.
In this episode, the story of how a 17-year-old named Mary Godwin came to write Frankenstein and in doing so write the first great work of science fiction.
In this episode, the story of how an unlikely cast of characters brought James Joyce's Ulysses to America, got it legalized, and changed how we understand what literature can do.
In this episode: the life of Belle De Costa Greene, the most glamorous and influential librarian in early 20th Century America, who kept a life-long secret that could have ended her career.
In this episode, we look at the remarkable turnaround in independent bookstores in the U.S. After thousands closed from 1995 to 2008, over the last decade more bookstores are setting up shop...and staying open. How did it happen? And will it continue?
In this inaugural episode, we consider the resurgence of interest in George Orwell's 1984, and the story of how 1984 came to be in the first place.
