Pantheon Books

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Spread the holiday cheer giveaway ends this FRIDAY!

“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”

- Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

[via Buzzfeed]

Publishers Weekly has posted three gorgeous, full-color pages from Charles Burns’ upcoming The Hive, the sequel to X’ed Out. Click through for the rest! (via Panel Mania: The Hive)

The pretty, pretty ARCs for Snapper by debut writer Brian Kimberling (coming in April 2013) have landed! Super excited about this one.

On warm days, a soft smell of milk rises from the walls of my house. The walls are plastered and whitewashed, tiles cover the ground, but from the pores of the walls and the cracks of the floor, the smell rises to me, persists, steals in like the sweat of an ancient love.
 
Once my house was a cowshed. The house of a horse and a she-ass and a few milk cows. It had a wide wooden door, with an iron bolt across it, concrete troughs, yokes for cattle, jugs, cans, and milking stations.
 
And a woman lived in the cowshed, she worked and slept in it, dreamed and wept. And on a bed of sacks she gave birth to her son.

- from The Loves of Judith by Meir Shalev, out now from Schocken Books. Read an excerpt.

In truth, the relationship between persona and person can be problematic. Of all the celebrity encounters I’ve experienced, the one that sticks with me is the briefest, most random, possibly the saddest. Early one morning, many years ago, I came out of my apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and got ready to go for a run. As I breathed the spring air, the door to the adjoining building opened and another jogger emerged. We started stretching our hamstrings side by side, and I glanced over and acknowledged the other man with a friendly nod.
 
Three almost invisible things happened in rapid succession. First, he nodded back with a pleasant smile. Second, I realized that he was Robin Williams. Third, he realized that I realized he was Robin Williams, and his eyes went dead. Not just dead: empty. It was as if the storefront to his face had been shuttered, cutting off any possibility of interaction. There wasn’t anything rude about this, and I respected his privacy, honoring the code observed by all New Yorkers who know they can potentially cross paths with an A-list name at any corner deli. Or was it his celebrity I was respecting? Whichever, a very small moment of human connection between two people had been squelched by the appearance of a third, not-quite-real person: the movie star. The second I recognized who the other jogger was, his persona got in the way. I couldn’t not see him as “Robin Williams.” And he knew it.
 
This happens dozens of times in any well-known person’s day. It’s why Williams’s eyes shut down so completely; it’s why I left him alone and went for my run. I felt bad for the man, even if I hadn’t actually done anything. Because people do, in fact, do things. Think of all those fans who meet movie stars and insist on being photographed with them, the snapshot serving as both proof and relic. Think, too, of the man who shot and killed John Lennon but made sure to get his autograph first.

- from Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame by Ty Burr, coming 9/18 from Pantheon Books

Here’s a closeup of the gorgeous case for Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword! More pictures and details here.

We’re thrilled to finally reveal the cover for Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword! This follow-up to House of Leaves and Only Revolutions hits the shelves on October 16th, with a deluxe limited edition coming on November 13th. More details here. Head on over to io9 to see Mark talk more about this book and his design process, and read through his live Twitter chat earlier today at @markdanielewski.