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Americans love scandal, especially juicy scandal involving their politicians and celebrities. But it will be interesting to see how they take to the scandal involving their football, both in the [...]

'Round up the usual suspects,' Captain Renault famously said at the end of Casablanca, and if there was ever a movie line that could apply year after year to the [...]

John Grisham's aptly titled Appeal had the most of it, as far as the novel-buying reading public went, earning the #1 slot on our hardcover fiction list last year--just enough [...]

There is a new sports season neatly tucked in between the Super Bowl and spring training. It should be called the Steroid Season, in which revelations about performance-enhancing drug use [...]

Maybe the mainstream media is just too polite to come out and say: we're pretty damn close to a depression in this country (recently, the National Bureau of Economic Research [...]

Over the past several years, a funny thing happened to the press and congressional oversight--they've been preempted by the publishing industry. Not so long ago, it was the New York [...]

Well, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, you won't have sudoku to kick around anymore. After years in the forefront, not a single sudoku title was submitted to PW for the 2007 [...]

As Captain Renault famously said in Casablanca: 'Round up the usual suspects!' Well, the part of Renault was recently played by Rep. Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.) as he called pitcher Roger [...]

'It's the greatest spectator sport in the country,' says Gov. Frank Skeffington of the game of politics in Edwin O'Connor's classic 1950s novel, The Last Hurrah. 'People begin as strangers [...]

For those who have followed PW's coverage of the sports publishing industry over the years, the one constant has been the absolute hegemony that baseball books have enjoyed, regardless of [...]

The thing that jumps out at you about PW's 2006 paperback bestsellers is how much they have been helped by the media, especially television. Love it or loathe it, the [...]

Like its protagonist, 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel by Peter Golenbock has become the stuff of legend. 'I don't care what the newspapers say about me,' the old PR adage [...]

American sports represents, in many ways, the pulse of the nation. For example, in the manner of civil rights, America first ennobled itself through a sporting event--on April 15, 1947, [...]

In early 2006 James Frey was chastised, ostracized and perhaps indelibly stigmatized by Oprah Winfrey's public humiliation of him on national TV. But that was this year. Last year, thanks [...]

April 13 of this year will mark the 100th birthday of Samuel Beckett, the great Irish playwright, poet and novelist whose work, according to his 1969 Nobel Prize citation, brought [...]

Elvis used to lament that it'll be 'a blue Christmas without you.' For literate sports fans (and the booksellers who love them), Christmas 2005 may well turn out to be [...]

'... Backlist is like reaching down and picking up gold from the sidewalk. There's nothing like it.' --Bennett Cerf from At Random As Bud Collyer used to say on that [...]

Let's talk about Dan Brown's phenomenal performance on the charts one more time, and then we'll move on to the rest of the top bestsellers of 2004. Brown is the [...]

IT'S BEEN A HECTIC five months in the sports world since the Boston Red Sox vanquished the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first championship in 86 years. By December, [...]

NAMATH, Hornung, Unitas, Auerbach, Starr, Palmer, Gehrig. These legendary sports names have been imprinted on the American mind just as deeply as Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy. And this fall, [...]

SPRING TRAINING: warm weather, breezy palm trees and the return of baseball after a long winter. With it comes the renewal of hope among the 30 major league teams and [...]

In 2002, only one trade paperback went over the million mark in sales: Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook. Last year, there were five, and two of them were fiction. At the [...]

IT WILL CO DOWN AS THE YEAR of the sports bestseller. PW counts seven titles that made long stays on multiple bestseller lists in 2003: Who's Your Caddy? by Rick [...]

WAR IN THE MIDDLE East, nukes in North Korea, the stock market in severe recession. Not the happiest of clays for Americans. In turbulent times, America has always looked for [...]

BASEBALL--AND THE SPORTS PUBLISHING INDUSTRY--dodged a high, hard-one recently when the players and owners came to their senses and negotiated an agreement that averted a strike. What would a strike [...]

IF IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST form of flattery, then the sports publishing industry must be cloning itself silly over the remarkable success of Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit (Random House). For years, [...]

Green Mile serialization captures six of the top seven mass market slots While the trade paperback bestseller list continues to reflect a steady stream of chicken soup, cedars, comics and [...]

To paraphrase the words of Henry Kissinger, 'peace is at hand' in the sports world. For the first time in what seems like ages, every major sport is at peace, [...]

It's like an uncontrollable monster. The President couldn't do anything with it. The Congress didn't want to, pardon the expression, lay a glove on it. The fans, who end up [...]

New nonfiction, even by the likes of Stern and Limbaugh, can be a tough sell after their hardcover numbers; the real gravy is in the backlist. It's been said that [...]

In 1873 Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg took 80 days to circumnavigate the globe; in 1962 John Glenn made the journey aboard Friendship 7 in 90 minutes. Today-- in an age [...]

Some see it as a battle of heavyweights, in the same league as Kennedy vs. Nixon, Rommel vs. Patton or Ali vs. Frazier. A battle royal is shaping up as [...]

First the bad news. Major League baseball is in trouble. The economic hangover that the rest of the country has been enduring for several years has finally reached the summer [...]

At precisely 11 p.m. EST on November 4, 2008, the polls in California closed and the networks rushed to call its 55 electoral votes for Barack Obama, putting him over [...]

There are two games that define the National Football League: the New York Jets monster upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III--which brought the upstart American Football League [...]

They cover anything and everything that's nonfiction. There are vest-pocket books on presidents, generals, writers, Jews, philosophers, terrorism, myths, music, even issues and ethics. They come in hardcover and paperback, [...]

In the last 15 months, the publishing industry has seen an orgy of anti-Bush books, and people are buying them. Since George Bush delivered his second inaugural address, only one [...]

Industry looks to heroes and nostalgia to smoothe America's bruised psyche THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11 changed America forever, but America must move on. That's what we've been told by [...]

It all started with Sourcebooks' publication of And the Crowd Goes Wild by Joe Garner in 1999. Two CDs tucked into the inside cover of a coffee-table book, reasonably priced [...]

There is something special about baseball parks. Ebbetts Field has been gone for more than 40 years, yet people talk about it like it still stands in Flatbush. They even [...]

There is a scene in the movie The Verdict in which Paul Newman, playing a down-and-out lawyer working a case against the rich and powerful, faces the jury and, in [...]

With recent cloth reissues of his masterpieces, the New Yorker ace is finding new fans for Old New York Joseph Mitchell is one of the great literary mysteries of the [...]

Books about America's 'Second Civil War' pack a potent frontlist with backlist wallop 'Victory has 100 fathers,' John F. Kennedy said in 1961, 'and defeat is an orphan.' Although he [...]

What do William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Roddy Doyle and Frank McCourt have in common? They have all collaborated, in one way or another, in a conspiracy of mirth, a [...]

A variety of titles show how to make 'good sports' out of kids--and parents Kill the Umpire! Remember the old William Bendix, movie about the trials and tribulations of a [...]

To many, the sight of a red-breasted robin is thc first sign of spring. To others--mostly weekend athletes, many of them aging Baby Boomers who have been hibernating all winter--it [...]

It was a publisher's worst nightmare--the author who ups and disappears during the final editorial preparations for his book. And this was not just some ordinary book, but an expensive-to-produce [...]