Essay: On Metal and 'Moby-Dick'

They’re curious bedfellows—heavy metal and classic literature—but not as surprising as you might think. Consider how many heavy rock and metal bands—notably Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, and Metallica—have gone ekphrastic and based individual songs on works of literature. Still, few bands come to mind as having devoted an entire album to one book. Enter Mastodon’s 2004 release, Leviathan, inspired by and loosely based on Melville’s classic.

To an extent, all albums are “conceptual” in that they are totalities, but the term is most often used to describe albums in which the musical composition, lyric content, and album art integrate themes and establish a narrative. This is entirely true of Leviathan, right down to Paul A. Romano’s cover design of a white sperm whale breaching to toss a ragged whaling ship.

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 17, 2011

Our top books hitting bookstores this week. Go online for our reviews and full On-Sale Calendar.

Drawing Board: Matt Kish

Matt Kish, artist and author of Moby-Dick in Pictures talks about how the book came to be.

Five Questions for Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick, winner of the National Book Award, talks about his new book Why Read Moby-Dick? with PW.

PW Tip Sheet: All Aboard the Pequod!

The National Book Award committee has unfurled a typically iconoclastic list of finalists, sidestepping the big names of the year—Didion, Harbach, Eugenides—in favor of debuts, smaller presses, lots of biographies, and lots of looking back. If there’s anything unifying the titles—or the adult titles, at least—it’s mood and focus: they’re overwhelmingly about the past and overwhelmingly about societies in the grip of transition and individuals in the grip of history. They’re books about hard times (is it any wonder these are the books speaking to us now?)

Some books look at the past—and some books from the past, it turns out, never quite leave us. Nathaniel Philbrick, himself a NBA winner, has a new book out this week—Why Read Moby-Dick?—and it got us thinking about how certain books seem to excite other books.

Three Questions for a Children's Bookseller: Meghan Goel

Meghan Goel, children’s book buyer at BookPeople in Austin, Tex., cues us in to the books she (and her customers) are looking forward to this season.

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 10, 2011

Our top 10 picks of books hitting bookstores this week, including new titles by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser, Jeffrey Eugenides, Harry Belafonte, Roz Chast, and Alan Hollinghurst.

Reading List: Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey’s Eugenides’s highly anticipated new novel is out this week, and we asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides to make us a reading list of books on marriage. He sent us five titles, “the books I know best, and thought most about, while writing The Marriage Plot.”

In Praise of 'Messy' Writing

Too often writers forget how rewarding it is for readers to stumble upon that extra detail extraneous to the narrative, there because it’s there. (This is especially true for writers coming out of M.F.A. background where economy is fetishized.) Even writers on the terser end of the prose spectrum slow down just for a moment.

Tip Sheet for the Week of October 10, 2011: For Pleasure

This week’s Tip Sheet is dedicated to reading and writing with pleasure and for pleasure. We have a reading list from Jeffrey Eugenides, a q&a with Austin, Tex.’s BookPeople’s children’s buyer on what the littlest readers are looking forward to, and an essay by our Gabe Habash in praise of “messy writing.”

What is PW Tip Sheet?

Welcome to our newest weekly newsletter, print column and Web page, coming Fridays online and Mondays in print. Edited by Parul Sehgal with contributions from Gabe Habash and other PW staff members, Tip Sheet covers books hitting shelves this week and books already in the marketplace making news. You'll see an incisive weekly essay, exclusive author interviews, bookseller Q&As, hot picks from our On-Sale Calendar, and timely features from PW's archives. So, without further ado, here's this week's issue:

Welcome to PW Tip Sheet

PW lives in the future. (But only slightly, three months to be exact.) Which means that while everyone else is enjoying autumn, we’re in December, huddling between stacks of dog-eared galleys, agonizing over our best books list. We’re having spirited cubicle confabs and doing loads of rereading, waiting and hoping for that click in the brain—there really should be a word for it—when you realize the book you’re reading isn’t just good, it’s special. The click in the brain that signals, Yes. This book I will revisit and recommend.

Black Like Who?: PW Talks with Toure

Touré's highly anticipated Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness just hit the shelves (and the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We catch up with the journalist, talk show host, and Twitter-provocateur to get the story behind the book.

Three Questions (for a bookseller): Greenlight's Rebecca Fitting

Rebecca Fitting, co-owner of Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore, cues us in to the books she (and her customers) are looking forward to this season.

On Sale This Week: PW's Top 10 Books for the Week of October 3, 2011

Our top ten picks of books hitting bookstores this week, including new ones from Art Spiegelman, Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Cosby!

On Sale This Week: PW's Top 10 Books for the Week of October 3, 2011

Our top ten picks of books hitting bookstores this week, including new ones from Art Spiegelman, Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Cosby!

The Worst Book Ever is 'How to Avoid Huge Ships'

Currently only available from nine sellers, the lowest price sitting at $131, details about this mysterious book are scant. What we do know is that it’s written by Captain John W. Trimmer, and that it’s 112 pages. And that’s about it.

Excerpt: The Fever Had Many Facets

In his latest, Walter Mosley brings back Leonid McGill, who has to fend off the problems of a dysfunctional family and one Zella Grisham, who can't quite remember shooting her boyfriend seven years prior.