“That’s the finding of James S. Jaffe, a rare-books expert brought in to review the contents of the safe-deposit box at a bank in Ms. Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala.”
Category: words
How Tiny GreyWolf Press Became A Big Deal Publisher
“Over the past few years, as publishing conglomerates merged, restructured, and grappled with Amazon, a midwestern press snuck in and found a genuinely new way forward for nonfiction.”
How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive Handwriting
“Thicker ink, fewer smudges, and more strained hands: an Object Lesson.”
Unpacking The Call For Diverse Books
“Sometimes it seems that what publishing is looking for, when they look to the Market to sell books by marginalized writers, is a single story. It is: this writer is *the* Dominican writer, or *the* Japanese writer, or *the* Sudanese writer that you should read right now. After all, we live in a culture that sells books with the tagline, if you read only one book this year.”
Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?
“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”
The Reading Is So Hard – But That Doesn’t Make It Brilliant (Or Does It?)
“The reader who assumes that abstruse prose is clever prose, or that there is a reliable correlation between opacity and depth, is bound to waste a lot of time on writing that doesn’t deserve it. She is also liable to end up praising works that confound her, for fear of being revealed as a dimwit if she confesses her perplexity.”
Frustrated: Editor Blasts Critics Complaining About Lack of Diversity And Transparency at Writers Conference
Editor Kate Gale took aim at the charges in a blog post at Huffington Post in a plea for members to stop questioning (attacking) the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
Editor’s Rant About Diversity Complaints Brings Down Wrath Of The Internet
The language in Kate Gale’s piece has set off a firestorm. Discussing a complaint that AWP is not inclusive of various ethnic groups–and responding directly to a charge that the organization has been dismissive of Native Americans–Gale writes of trying to find the potential “Indian hater” in the organization. Then, speaking about issues of diversity around gender and sexuality, Gale asks, rhetorically, ” How gay is AWP?,” before stating that she feels she is “30% gay” because of “all the time with girls before I started dating guys.”
Stephen King: Does Being A Prolific Writer Make You A Bad Writer?
No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.
Judge Orders $10 Million Of “50 Shades” Royalties To Be Set Aside For Defrauded Woman
“A jury decided in February that Jennifer Pedroza had been conned when the rights were sold to Random House. It found that Amanda Hayward, who signed the deal on behalf of their firm The Writers Coffee Shop, tricked Ms Pedroza into signing a restructuring contract that cut her out of royalties rights.”