With the release of the latest film adaptation of the literary American classic, THE GREAT GATSBY (F. Scott Fitzgerald) the book has become more popular than ever. In fact, at the time of writing this post it is listed at Amazon as the #6 bestselling book.

Over at the ever-resourceful National Education Association Website , the Contributor, Phil Nast has compiled a wonderful list of online reading guides and other resources for Teachers. Well, anyone who loves this book will enjoy their links, it’s fun stuff!

The list is extensive, but very precise. They give you Reading Guides, Essays, Indexes, and even a Study Guide on the “Jazz Age” which takes you to that era with photos, video clips, etc… it’s like you jumped into a time machine, ha!

There are also some amazing links to a few one-hour radio podcast episodes that cover the book & author. They even have a Google Maps page that lists all the real-life locations as read in the book. Did someone scream, “Road Trip!”?

So, if you’re a Teacher looking to inspire students, or just a major fan of this great American novel, then please be sure to visit the NEA site today, just CLICK HERE!

Great novels deserve to be celebrated every now and then. In this post we’re sharing a podcast that does just that with one of our most beloved literary classics, The Great Gatsby. The radio series, Studio 360′s AMERICAN ICONS, explores F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age.

Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We'll drive around the tony Long Island suburbs where Gatsby was set, and we'll hear from Andrew Lauren about his film G, which sets Gatsby among the hip-hop moguls. And Azar Nafisi describes the power of teaching the book to university students in Tehran. Readings come courtesy of Scott Shepherd, an actor who sometimes performs the entire book from memory.

So, if you love the book, then please… listen to this:

Yesterday, as an ongoing part of their series of “Inside Random House” promotional videos, Random House Inc. posted a new feature story titled, “The Art of Cover Design” . Its main focus is about the creation and art direction of Book Jackets… and how they relate to both sales and the book author’s artistic vision.

The video features members of the Random House creative team who are very involved with the design of book covers, listed here in order of appearance:

Marysarah Quinn - Senior VP & Creative Director of Crown Publishing Group
Robbin Schiff - Executive Art Director of Random House Publishing Group
Chip Kidd - Associate Art Director at Knopf & Editor-At-Large of Graphic Novels at Pantheon
Peter Mendelsund - Associate Art Director at Knopf & Art Director at Pantheon
Christopher Brand - Art Director for Crown, Hogarth, and Broadway

This post is a quick shout-out to announce that we have added a ton of new photos of Chip Kidd-Designed Book Covers over in our GALLERY PAGE. Yeah, there were so many that we had to split them up between Page ONE and TWO. There’s a bunch of new James Ellroy, Haruki Murakami, J. D. McClatchy and even a John LeCarre!

So, please be sure to visit them both! The link TAB to the Gallery is always at the top of this page, just below the header. Or, if you’re lazy ( Ha Ha! ), then please just CLICK HERE. You will be glad you did!

(The photo up above is just a small example of the book covers added)

While goofing around on Facebook the other day this ad banner for Neil Gaiman’s MAKE GOOD ART Speech Book popped-up on the right-hand side of my page! Of course this is the brand-new book designed by Chip Kidd that features the, now famous, Commencement Speech Neil Gaiman gave last year. Yes, it was turned into a graduation gift book and his speech was AWESOME!

Hey, I thought this was fun news!

Here’s a quick post to share this fun photo taken by Chip Kidd while he was visiting Japan. At random, he sort of walked into a Japanese Bookstore and discovered that they had a special section just for him! Yes, some Bookstore Employee must be a big fan because he set-up a special display area that features books written by Chip and/or with book covers designed by him… pretty cool huh?! WOW, What an honor!! (We Love Japan!)

Oh hey, if you want to see a huge amount of Book jackets designed by Chip Kidd then please be sure to visit our GALLERY PAGE, just click here.

Just the other day, Chip Kidd was in Pennsylvania where he was a guest on TAKE NOTE RADIO - WPSU, the official radio show of Penn State University. This was where Chip had gone to school. The Radio Talk Show Host was Patty Satalia and they talked about Graphic Design, Creating Book Covers, What it’s like to write your own books (The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners, and his new book, GO: A Kidd’s Guide To Graphic Design) and much much more! Mrs. Satalia’s questions were very well-researched & also pretty clever. Whew!

You can hear the complete interview, right here in it’s entirety, but we also suggest visiting their website for more broadcasts.

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On May 9th, 2013, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show interviewed David Sedaris, the author of “LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS” (Little, Brown and Company). Check out the video, it’s pretty funny!

The entire Book Publishing Industry is getting totally geared-up for the next BOOK EXPO AMERICA 2013 event happening later this week in New York City. It opens on Thursday, May 30th and runs to Sunday, June 1st.

Random House, and all of it’s subsidiaries (Pantheon, Knopf, Doubleday, Vintage, Crown, etc…) will all be there and it looks like they have a great line up! There will be multiple Authors, live and in person, there to autograph books and the event also has a ton of great things to do. In fact, there is so much going on within this event that we can’t possibly list it all here.

So, for a complete list of what’s going on and who will be there please be sure to visit the text links down below. Hey, it’s gonna be fun and we hope to see you there!

Official RANDOM HOUSE Books and Author Event List, CLICK HERE!

Official 2013 BOOK EXPO AMERICA Website, CLICK HERE!

The LIBRARY JOURNAL : Librarian’s Guide to the 2013 B.E.A., CLICK HERE!

Also, as a fun and friendly side-note, we would like to mention that our good friend, Author Neil Gaiman, will be there for a special lecture titled, “Why Fiction is Dangerous”. For more information please read the graphic down below & also visit the 2013 BEA website (link up above).

This week Neil Gaiman’s MAKE GOOD ART Book came out (which was designed by Chip Kidd) and one cool thing to happen is that the Philadelphia Weekly not only did a great interview all about the creation of this book, but they put Neil’s face on the cover! Oddly, this is only the second time that has happened (the first was on WIRED Magazine).

Neil Gaiman was interviewed by Kyle Cassidy. The article covers many topics all related to the new MAKE GOOD ART book like how did the, now famous, graduation Speech even come about and what prompted the creation of this book. It’s a great interview with this fun Author. Here’s a LINK to check it out, just CLICK HERE!