The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.
“It doesn’t make me esteem Wharton less. If anything, I take comfort in it, as a novelist.” Her own smash book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is out in paperback.
He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.
In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).
Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.