William Loving: Fells Point: A Novel

Fells Point: A Novel – William Loving – Rare Bird Books – Hardcover – 9781644285558 – 240 pages – $28.00 – June 9, 2026 – ebook available at lower prices

Fells Point is a bit of a noirish, bit of a postmodernish novel set in modern day Baltimore. In all honesty, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. For some reason I just did not expect to get into it so easily. Maybe because the writing is clear and the author clearly loves his characters and the city of Baltimore where the book takes place.

The novel’s protagonist is Daniel Doyle Jr., who comes off as bored with his life and aware that there must be something more. We kind of like him but we don’t quite know why. Maybe it is because now that he has reached the time he might have had his mid-life crisis, he finds out that he has a congenital heart defect that could kill him at any moment. Imminent death does seem to be a wake up call for Doyle so he starts exploring his home city for the first time. He makes a “bucket list” of places he has missed or taken for granted for his entire life that he can actually see for the first time.

Just as he’s beginning to get comfortable with his new understanding of Baltimore’s hidden treasures, Doyle starts to realize that he is being followed by a mysterious stranger who seems to appear wherever he goes. He wonders whether this is actually real, or some sort of fantasy he has created for himself, but it turns out to be real in a surprising and complicated way that makes the novel completely engrossing for the reader (and for the characters in it as well). Difficult life questions are asked and possibly answered.

Bill and I had an excellent conversation about this novel and Loving’s approach to fiction. And given the surprising twists and turns in this story, we were careful to avoid any spoilers. You will have to read the book to find out why it is so compelling. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

Before turning to fiction, Loving was an accomplished journalist at the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In addition to Fells Point, he is also the the author of two other novels,  City of Angles (set in Los Angeles) and Blue Earth River (set in Minneapolis). In his fiction, he has tended to explore the cities he has lived in, using his journalist’s skills to create stories that reflect those places in vivid ways. He currently lives in Pasadena, California with his wife.

William Loving has crafted a maze of identity and irony that leads to a climax that will stay with the reader long after the last page.”—David Bolton, author of Whispering Pines and Love Thief

“As thought-provoking as it is hilarious, Fells Point is a page-turning masterpiece of existential wit and suspense.”—J. Paul Rieger, author of A Most Unlikely Man and Sunscreen Shower

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

Author website

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David Margolick: When Caesar Was King

When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy – David Margolick – Shocken Books – Hardcover – 9780805242553 – 400 pages – $35.00 – November 11, 2025 – ebook edition available at lower cost, audio book also available.

I am almost the same age as author David Margolick, so was born too late to see any of Sid’s early classic shows that aired when he was establishing the way comedy would work on the then new medium, television. Growing up with a comedy writer father, Sid Caesar was legendary in our house as a revered progenitor of the current crop of television comedy, but by the time I was old enough to know who he was, Sid Caesar was no longer at the pinnacle of his success. Despite being active on TV through the sixties, seventies and beyond, he was no longer culturally relevant as he had been earlier in his career. Yet his impact on television and its audiences was massive, and I remember hearing my parents and their friends talk about Sid Caesar, Imogen Coca, Carl Reiner, and Mel Brooks and their less well-known writers, always with admiration and joy.

Whether you are lucky enough to have seen Sid Caesar in action in his early days, or know nothing about him at all, David Margolick’s biography brings Sid to life. He provides us with a vivid rendering of an extremely complicated actor/comedian. In the early 1950s, Caesar was television’s first real star, his show drawing am audience of twenty million people at a time before televisions were not even present in most homes in America. His sketches helped define the nature of television comedy for generations to come even to this day. (All you have to do is watch a Caesar sketch followed by a modern SNL sketch and you will get it.)

Most of Caesar’s writers and actors went on to their own successful and influential careers and helped define television culture for decades. His writers included Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), Mel Tolkin (All in the Family), Woody Allen (too many to list), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, The Producer) and Carl Reiner (Dick Van Dyke Show).

Sid Caesar success was relatively short-lived. As television moved to take over the heartland of America, other stars supplanted him. As Margolick makes clear, Caesar was a complicated, introverted, socially awkward person, completely unlike the public personae he portrayed in performance. He could not or would not adapt to the changing tastes of television audiences—perhaps because Caesar’s humor was based on and drawn from 20th century urban American Jewish experience, and was more sophisticated than what mass market television would support. And Caesar’s personality was not suited for the massive success he achieved.

Margolick’s research and attention to detail, interviews with key people involved in Caesar’s life and his obvious love for Caesar’s humor and culture all contribute to make this a highly readable and enjoyable book for anyone who is interested in American culture and especially television comedy.

David Margolick was a reporter on legal affairs for the New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar” column and covered, among other stories, the trial of O. J. Simpson. He was subsequently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His books include Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, At the Bar, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns; and Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, and The Promise and the Dream. He lives in New York City.

I very much enjoyed reading this biography, which is appropriately entertaining as well as informative. It broadened and deepened my appreciation for early television comedy, a milieu I enjoy. With the ubiquity of old television clips now available on YouTube, I was able to sample some of the sketches that are described in the book, including some I had never seen. Watching Caesar in action with his great supporting casts, while reading about those people in the book will change the way you see them now. David and I had a terrific conversation which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Buy the book here.

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Publishing Talks: Ramsey Kanaan of PM Press

Publishing Talks started as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It has been an ongoing education talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics. This latest episode features a recent conversation with Ramsey Kanaan about the anarchist publisher PM Press he founded in 2007, and his work in publishing, music and activism for the past many years. Ramsey has been a leader among the innovative, creative editors, publishers, and others in independent publishing and bookselling whose work is so important, especially now.

I met Ramsey years ago when he was working with activist AK Press he helped start in the UK. He later left AK, establishing PM Press in 2007 to focus on a wider range of literary publishing, and to reach a larger audience than AK nonfiction oriented publishing could do.

PM Press was originally based in the Bay Area and still maintains space there, but moved its main operations to Ithaca, New York in 2023, when it purchased the former Autumn Leaves bookstore space to establish its warehouse there. And there’s also a branch in the UK, so it’s pretty wide-reaching for an independent publisher. Publishing authors as varied as Ursula K. Le Guin, Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, C.L.R. James, James Kelman, and Jonathan Lethem, as well as a plethora of newer and less well-known voices, PM has become one of the most successful radical publishers of modern times. Their list is impressive, including a range of books in fiction, art, music, politics, history, and culture in print, ebook, and audio formats.

PM’s publishes widely, including coloring books and cookbooks, polemics, memoirs, novels, pamphlets, treatises, manifestos, and comics in almost every topic imaginable – bicycles, vegetables, squatting, sex, sports, punks, Wobblies, self-defense, parenting, striking, and much more. PM brings tremendous energy to its publishing, reaching readers “by any means necessary” with unmatched creativity and gusto.

Aside from his work in books and publishing, Ramsey was also the vocalist of the Scottish punk band Political Asylum.

We had a great conversation about books, publishing, distribution and the current state of politics in America. Talking to Ramsey, it’s clear that the energy and strength of outsider publishing is stronger than ever, and that energy is needed now more than ever.

Check out the press and its books here.

You can join Friends of PM Press to support their work and get access to an array of essential books.

PM is an altogether terrific outfit keeping the flags flying – red, black, and rainbow.  What energy! What facts-on-the-ground! What excitement! What dreams!—Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All and coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

If a revolutionary’s first weapon is a book, PM Press has the arsenal. Their texts are battle plans for a new world.—Peter Werbe, The Fifth Estate

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Kim Dower reading her poems for National Poetry Month, 2026

Authors Voices gives writers and poets a platform for reading their work. It’s been too infrequent a series in the past. Starting in 2026, inaugurated by this wonderful reading by Los Angeles poet Kim Dower, we will be presenting a monthly reading series with a representation of poets I feel have not received enough attention for their work.

Kim’s reading took place on April 1, 2026, the first day of National Poetry Month. Unfortunately we were delayed in publishing this episode, so apologies are due to the poet.

In this reading, Kim presents a range of her poems from her previously published books.

Kim Dower was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and has lived in Los Angeles for many years, where she is well known both for her poetry as well as her work in book publicity under the name “Kim from LA.”

Kim is the former City Poet Laureate for West Hollywood, California and is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry. Among her books has been a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a finalist for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom­.

Dower’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, as well as in many anthologies and journals, including Ploughshares, James Dickey Review, Plume, and Barrow Street. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension, and the West Hollywood Library. Kim lives with her family in West Hollywood, California.

Her books are all wonderful and frequently funny.

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom­

What She Wants

Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave

Last Train to the Missing Planet

Her website is here.

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Publishing Talks Interview: Luke Palder of MemoirGhostWriting.com

I discovered the very interesting Luke Palder by accident one day when I saw an ad he ran for his memoir writing and publishing business, MemoirGhostWriting.com. It sounded really interesting, and similar enough to some of my own work that I wanted to find out more about his work.

Luke is a serial entrepreneur in book publishing and production – he is the founder and CEO of ProofreadingServices.com, MemoirGhostwriting.com, TranslationServices.com, and TranscriptionServices.com. As he says about himself – “I’m committed to enhancing communication—whether it’s through the written word, across different languages, or from audio to text. My passion lies in empowering writers to share their stories, assisting businesses to overcome language barriers, and enabling individuals to immortalize their spoken words in written form. Leading these companies, my goal is to maintain the highest standards of service, treating every project with meticulous attention to detail.”

Publishing Talks has given me the opportunity to meet and talk to so many smart people in the book business. I really enjoy sharing the boundless creativity that motivates so many of us in the book business. Luke exemplifies those qualities and what this series of conversations is about. It was a pleasure to get to speak with him about his work and I am sure you will find this conversation of interest. We had a great conversation about his work, the book business and the importance of storytelling, among other subjects. His passionate commitment to people and their stories is visible in everything he does.

Luke is a Yale College graduate who also studied at Yale Law School, the Yale School of Management (SOM), Cambridge University, and Peking University. He is the founder of ProofreadingServices.com, serving more than 25,000 clients globally over 13 years. And he rode a bicycle across the United States, covering more than 4,000 miles in 63 days. He lives and works in North Carolina.

MemoirGhostWriting.com

ProofreadingServices.com

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Jack El-Hai: The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII — Jack El-Hai — PublicAffairs — 9781610394635 — 304 pages — Published September 2, 2014 — Paperback — $21.99 (ebook available at lower prices; audiobook download also available)

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was originally published more than ten years ago. It had some terrific reviews, and then became, like most books published today, a “backlist” title mostly available from online retailers. But now that it has become the basis of the well received film, Nuremburg, directed by James Vanderbilt, with a star studded cast, including Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, and Michael Shannon, the book has been re-issued in paperback and has deservedly found many new readers.

In my conversation with its author, Jack El-Hai, we talked mostly about the book itself, and not so much about what it is like for an author to find his book rediscovered because of a movie, though Jack did explain that the film only focuses on a small part of the story El-Hai explored in the book. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist takes on what was a complex relationship between the American psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley and the 22 Nazis who became his patients as they were imprisoned before their trial as war criminals in the 1945-46 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Of course the key figure among the Nazis was Herman Göring, who was not only an important early supporter of Hitler, as well as one of the central figures in the rise of Nazism, the conduct of WWII as head of the Luftwaffe, and of course one of the architects of the Holocaust. At the time he was captured by the Americans, he expected to become the next leader of Germany.

Kelley was brought in to examine the Nazi leaders who were to be the first tried for war crimes by the Allies – the idea being to determine whether they were each rational enough to stand trial for their horrific actions. As a psychiatrist, this gave him an exceptional opportunity – to gather information about the psychology of Nazis and to understand whether they were indeed within the range of normal human behavior or pathological.

Kelley became especially close with Göring, a formidable figure, who ultimately committed suicide rather than experience the humiliating death by hanging to which he was sentenced by the Tribunal. Kelley’s life was deeply influenced by his experiences with the Nazis, and El-Hai, who had access to Kelley’s files and talked extensively with his surviving children, paints a compelling portrait of a man whose suffering was extreme and led ultimately to his own unfortunate suicide some years later.

Given our present circumstances, a book about the psychological components of authoritarianism and the individuals who led Germany’s fascist enterprise cannot help to resonate. Reading this book will make you think about the nature of evil (and Arendt’s calling it “banal”) as well as the way that fascism masks the personal greed and pursuit of power that drove it.

I do recommend this book at anyone who is trying to grapple with what is happening to us now. And this conversation will be illuminating as well.

Jack El-Hai is an award-winning writer who has published innumerable articles and more than a dozen books. Jack’s other books include Face in the Mirror, The Lost Brothers,  and The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness.

He has contributed articles to Scientific American, Wired, Discover, GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Aeon, The Washington Post Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in Minneapolis.

“This intimate and insightful portrait of two intersecting, outsized personalities‑‑one an exemplar of public service and the other an avatar of evil‑‑is as suspenseful as a classic Hitchcock film that hinges on an eerie psychological secret. Readers of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist will be riveted by Jack El‑Hai’s moving study of how good and evil can converge in a heightened instant and across a lifetime.”—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winning author of Far from the Tree

Author website
Buy the book

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Publishing Talks Interview: Kathleen Schmidt, Publishing Confidential

I started Publishing Talks as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It has been great fun talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues in the book business.

I really enjoy the opportunities to find out about the boundless creativity that motivates so many of us in the book business, and I also really enjoy talking to others in the business, who like me, have tried to make sense of it all in some way or another.

Today’s conversation is with Kathleen Schmidt, a long time book publicist whose Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential, is widely read within the book business. Her newsletter is always a great source of thoughtful ideas and commentary about the current state of publishing and book marketing and promotion. I was inspired to speak with her after reading one of her truly great posts this past December, “Marketing + Publicity in 2026: Change Needs to Happen: The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Here’s a key quote from that piece that caught my attention right away:

“The industry must accept that some books absolutely will not get attention from legacy media and move towards what works for each book, whether that’s a marketing-heavy campaign or just pitching podcasts. Why are we still creating arbitrary publicity plans for every title when we know most of it is b.s.?”

She went on from there to provide a meaningful list of ideas and practices that any publisher, publicist or author can learn from, be inspired by, and adapt for their own best practices. I appreciate her honesty, willingness to try new things, and her understanding that failure is not a bad thing, but a way to learn and get better at what we do. Everyone in the book business is frustrated by the current media landscape and by the massive number of new (and old) book titles that makes getting attention for any new book so difficult, not to mention the competition from other media forms, social media included, that take attention away from books and reading. But that frustration needs to be converted into positive energy. Otherwise you may as well quit doing what you love to do.

Having a chance to speak with Kathleen was rewarding for me, and I am sure will be for you as well. She’s smart, creative and realistic. I am sure she is a good marketer too. We need more radical honesty, more innovation and more enjoyment in book marketing!

Her bio: Kathleen is the founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations with three decades of experience spanning publicity, literary representation, acquisitions editing, and ghostwriting. She has worked on more than 50 New York Times bestsellers and led global media and branding campaigns for politicians, A-list celebrities, athletes, and other high-profile figures.

I found another recent interview with Kathleen by Christelle Lujan at She Writes Magazine.  In that interviewsays: “First and foremost, I want Publishing Confidential to be a resource for authors to learn about the publishing industry.”

And here are a couple more of her posts:

30 Years in Book Publishing: What I’ve Learned
Why Advertising Doesn’t Work for Books

And here is her business website, Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations.

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Todd Goddard: Devouring Time: Jim Harrison a Writer’s Life

Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life — Todd Goddard — 9781799902362 – Blackstone Publishing — Hardcover — 558 pages — $29.99 — November 4, 2025

Jim Harrison was for so many readers – and other writers – one of the central voices of American literature for the last half century. When Harrison began writing, it was as a poet, and most readers came to his fiction and nonfiction much later. It was the novels and many novellas that drew large numbers of readers to him, while his first hand style nonfiction writing about food and his many adventures introduced him to a completely different audience who in many case, I am sure, also read his fiction. And then there was the film writing and the stories of fishing, carousing and gourmand like intake of food, alchohol, and drugs with friends like Thomas McGuane, Peter Matthiessen, Jimmy Buffett, and Jack Nicholson in Key West, Montana and Hollywood. Harrison became more than a writer, but also a publicly imagined character much like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose persona became entwined with his writing and made him that much more attractive to some of his readers.

His output as a writer was amazing: poetry, novels, novellas, short stories, magazine nonfiction, film scripts. His appetite for life was immense. His friendships were legendary and he was loved by many whose lives he touched. Fittingly, he died alone while in the midst of writing a poem.

In Devouring Time, Todd Goddard presents a meaningful account of this writer’s life, from beginning to end, including much about his persona that many readers could not have otherwise known. I’ve read much of Jim Harrison’s writing, and knew more than a little about his life. But I learned much more from this book, feeling after reading it that I understood Harrison more clearly both as a writer and a person. This is not a celebratory paean to someone’s hero, or the work of a starry eyed fan. Nor is it a reductionist scholarly account. This book is a carefully constructed narrative worthy of the subject’s complicated, sometimes very painful, but always meaningful life. Goddard refuses to turn away from Harrison as a human being whose life included physical and emotional challenges, who suffered, who lived a full life also of joy and beauty, and despite his foibles, his accomplishments were immense and lasting.

Jim Harrison was born in Michigan in 1937 and died Patagonia, Arizona in 2016. He wrote twenty-one books of fiction and fourteen books of poetry that influenced many other writers of all kinds and won him legions of readers. Harrison helped shape the course of contemporary American literature, revitalizing in particular the novella, a form he mastered and reinvigorated.

Though it was his fiction, nonfiction, and film writing that made him famous (and by which he made his living), it was always poetry that he loved most, and while he was a thoroughly social writer who enjoyed the company of many friends (and lovers), he was simultaneously a private person who cherished remoteness, the singularity of the wilderness, and solitude, and also the company of his wife and children at home.

Todd Goddard conducted over a hundred interviews and had full access to Harrison’s collected papers, as well as the cooperation of Harrison’s family to create this fully formed literary biography of one of our most important writers of the last half century.

I very much enjoyed the opportunity to speak with Todd. We talked about Harrison, of course, but also about the art of biography and the process of writing a book with so much depth of attention and detail. Whether you are a reader of Jim Harrison’s poetry or prose, this biography will capture your attention and in all likelihood, lead you to want to read further in Harrison’s extensive body of work.

“Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight…and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and ALL.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

Calendars
Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio
another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.
They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like
their cousin clocks but break down at inoppormne times.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar
but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons
of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
Of late I’ve escaped those fatal squares
with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.
I had to become the moving water I already am,
falling back into the human shape in order
not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.
Our old cat doesn’t care. He laps the water where my face used to be.

from IN SEARCH OF SMALL GODS, Copper Canyon Press, 2010

Author website
Buy the book

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Shirley C. Strum: Echoes of Our Origins: Baboons, Humans, and Nature

Echoes of Our Origins: Baboons, Humans, and Nature — Shirley C. Strum, with Cassandra Phillips — Johns Hopkins University Press — Hardcover — 978-1-4214-5203-6 — 376 pages — $32.95 — September 9, 2025 — ebook edition available.

This book was a fantastic discovery for me. I consider myself fairly well read; I’ve studied anthropology extensively and I even briefly went to graduate school to study biology, but my knowledge of primates is woefully poor. Shirley’s book was a great introduction for me to one part of a much wider field, and got me excited and engaged with baboons, who turn out to be incredibly interesting animals, and of course connect us not only to issues of human evolution, but also historical and modern ecology, issues of human/animal interactions, and human responsibilities in relation to other animals, especially primates.

I feel like I learned more from this book than almost anything I have read in the past year. Shirley Strum’s story of her fifty years studying baboons is completely compelling.

Her baboon story started in 1972, when as a graduate student, Strum traveled to Kenya to study the origins of human aggression by observing baboons. Her earliest discoveries completely changed the scientific study of baboons, and many long-held assumptions about primate behavior.

Living closely with a number of different populations of baboons over the past half century, and closely observing their lives, Strum has learned more than any other human about baboons’ complex strategies of negotiation, collaboration, and resilience. And through her work, Strum has had to deal with an array of challenges – not just within her field itself, but in the changing ecology and landscape of Africa, as more people have taken over former baboon (and many other animals’) territories, creating new forms of human/animal conflicts, and changing the evolution of baboon society itself.

In addition to illustrating the incredibly interesting lives of baboons, Strum’s experiences tell us a great deal about how human science works, and the challenges that we face in trying to deal with the massive effects of the anthropocene on our fellow beings in the world. I know it’s simplistic to say that baboons and other primates have a lot to teach homo sapiens about how to live cooperatively together, but I do think that understanding more about primate life can in fact teach us a great deal about ourselves, if only we can begin to see that we humans are not at the top of a hierarchy that makes us “better than” or “smarter than” our evolutionary cohort.

Echoes of Our Origins combines natural history, adventure, memoir, feminism and like some of the its best antecedents in nature writing, asks us to think about and empathize with the natural world in previously unfamiliar ways.

I hope you enjoy our wide-ranging conversation as much as I did. While it is doubtful that I will ever get to Africa to see baboons in the wild for myself, Echoes has given me an unmatched opportunity to imagine these incredible animals.

I’ve been recommending this book to anyone interested in humanity, ecology, our history and our future.

Dr. Shirley C. Strum is a Professor of Anthropology and a Professor of the Graduate Division, School of Social Sciences, at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Kenya. Her first book was Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons.

More about Dr. Shirley C. Strum here.

Buy the book here.

 

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Publishing Talks Interviews Thad McIlroy-Future of Publishing

Publishing Talks started as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It was great fun talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

In the past few years, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing and bookselling in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues in the book business.

I really enjoy the opportunities to find out about the boundless creativity that motivates so many of us in the book business, and I also really enjoy talking to others in the business, who like me, have tried to make sense of it all in some way or another. That’s one of the reasons I have frequently sought out other publishing consultants, gurus, and observers over the years, to talk about various topics in publishing. Sometimes it is about the history of books, but more often during the past almost twenty years of this series, conversations have centered on change and the future of publishing.

And that brings me to Thad McIlroy, a publishing consultant and author whose aptly named website is The Future of Publishing. As you can imagine, Thad and I had a great time together, and I hope you will enjoy hearing what he has to say, especially about emerging technology. Thad is a really smart guy who understands publishing from multiple perspectives.

AI discussions cannot be avoided at this point. My current thinking is that the version of AI we have now (LLMs) is not going to be the AI technology that will eventually take over our world. In the meantime, human creativity is still valued and it would surprise no one if there is a massive backlash against this technology before too long, especially as it is applied to the creative arts. Would love to hear what listeners think, so feel free to comment.

Here’s what Thad sent me as a working bio: “Writing and publishing are in my blood—my father was an author and broadcaster, and Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows) was my third cousin. I began as a bookseller in Toronto, then founded Virgo Press (1977) and co-founded book distributor Beatty & Church (1979). In 1985, I created what I believe was the first trade book using desktop publishing technology.

Now based in San Francisco, I’m an electronic publishing consultant, and author. I co-founded Publishing Technology Partners and serve as contributing editor at Publishers Weekly, focusing on AI and innovation. My latest book is  (2024, re 2025). I’ve authored dozens of books and articles exploring publishing technology, metadata, and industry transformation.”

Thad’s current interests are focused on AI. Here is a recent post of his on Onix 3 (if you’re not in the book business, this piece may be a bit in the weeds for you, but if you are in the business and care about data, search and findability, this matters – alot.)

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