Read about a smell – and your brain thinks you’re smelling it. Read about a soccer game – and your brain thinks you’re playing it. Especially if it’s fiction. Who says reading isn’t a good workout?
Category: publishing
So Experimental Fiction Usually Makes Your Realist Heart Quail? Here’s Some Advice
“The tenets of modernism dictate that real literature needs to be difficult, otherwise it’s kitsch. I’m no unreconstructed modernist, and I’m not going to tell you that Marcus’s novel is good precisely because the dribbling masses wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Rather, I’m telling you to read The Flame Alphabet because it’s unique, continually surprising, and often flat-out disgusting.”
Man Asian Literary Prize To Shin’s Please Look After Mom
” South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin won Asia’s most prestigious prize for literature on Thursday for her novel about a family’s guilty soul-searching after the disappearance of their elderly mother. … Shin is the first woman to win the award and the first South Korean to be shortlisted.”
Magazines Aren’t In As Much Trouble In Canada – And Publishers Can Thank The Economy For That
Canadian magazines are faring better during the recession. Is that bad news for U.S. publishers? No: “Several of the reasons that Canadian newsstands are doing better support U.S. publishers’ argument that long-term reader demand is only part of the problem. Some of the other problems are temporary, unrelated to magazines, or both.”
Philly’s Free Library Suspends Expansion Plans As It Rethinks Its Mission
“The Free Library of Philadelphia will always be a huge repository of knowledge for casual learners as well as scholars. But as patrons increasingly look to the system for job assistance, Internet access, and an after-school safe haven for children, the library’s physical manifestation is morphing as the idea of the institution evolves.”
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? Redesign The Cover
“Designing the cover for Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a book about child abuse, has always been a difficult proposition, and too many past efforts have cast the eponymous character as a pre-teen sex bomb. Which is why John Bertram, an architect and blogger, sponsored a competition calling for better ideas.”
Should Amazon Be Feared?
“The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.”
This Bookstore Is Closing – Very, Very Slowly
The 83-year-old owner of Evanston’s Bookman’s Alley keeps changing the closing date of his venerable, quirky store – but you know he’s serious about it because the gumdrop bowl is gone.
Who Should Control E-Book Pricing?
“The launch of an antitrust probe against book publishers, which the US Department of Justice has threatened, couldn’t have come at a weirder time.”
Erotica Goes Bestseller And Mainstream – For Women, On E-book Readers
“Publishing executives said the word-of-mouth excitement accompanying Fifty Shades of Grey was reminiscent of that accompanying novels like The Da Vinci Code, The Kite Runner and Eat, Pray, Love. Except this book has been credited with something else: introducing women who usually read run-of-the-mill literary or commercial fiction to graphic, heavy-breathing erotica. “