Publishers Marketplace reports today that Don Thompson, author of the widely read The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, has just sold a follow up that seems to be in a similar vein. The book is set to be published by Palgrave in spring 2014. Read More

 It’s often difficult to interview artists. This is not to say they’re inarticulate—far more often the opposite is true—but because artists make a career of nonverbal communication, speaking with them always has a looming sense of: well, what is there to talk about? Their art? All you can hope for is footnotes. Their lives? Their business? Their practice, every little element of it? And then occasionally throw out some inane comment like “that’s great” after they tell you about some new resin they’ve discovered? What was wrong with the old resin? Come to think of it, you didn’t even know that was resin. Read More

From a biographical angle, it’s better to think of P.G. Wodehouse as more entertainment honcho than author. He was a member of the jet set before there were jets, and translated his shtick from one medium to another the way a sitcom producer today might branch out into movies. (Could Arrested Development have a more direct antecedent than Wodehouse?) He loved writing books, and did so compulsively, but he began his writing career at newspapers before moving on to serialized novels. He bounced between New York, England and Hollywood, offering his talent where it was required, whether for Cole Porter comedies or talkies. He ended his life on Long Island and was as American as he was British. All this is to say that the new collection of his correspondence, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (W.W. Norton, 640 pp., $35), is not only a valuable supplement to Robert McCrum’s 2004 biography, but a study of the burgeoning comedy industry. Read More

Halfway through Always Looking (Knopf, 224 pp., $45), the third collection of John Updike’s art criticism—and the first posthumously released one—the celebrated novelist begins to rank haystacks. The snowy Claude Monet landscapes in question appear in the glossy hardback a page before the ranking, and since all of them feature a haystack or two, you would think they would all be fairly similar in quality. Read More

Last night at Smalls Jazz Club in the West Village, Richard Prince’s imprint Fulton Ryder celebrated the debut of a new book by Dan Colen, A Real Bronx Cheer. If you’ll head over now to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, you’ll see things got pretty bonkers. Read More

Art book publisher Taschen is reissuing one of its bestselling titles ever, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Drawings and Paintings. The book, which runs almost 700 pages and retails for $200, is the most thorough book of Leonardo’s life and work available. Read More