“The online retailer appears to have tightened up its review policy to weed out people boosting their mates’ books with glowing notices, but whatever algorithms they’re using to work this out seem also to be catching anyone who engages with their favourite writers on social media.”
Category: words
Is Our Publishing System Narrowing Our Literary Culture?
“We are losing stories in the UK. We are narrowing our literary culture. We have a publishing industry which continues to perpetuate its failure to reflect the extraordinary spectrum of communities in this country and so we are losing that potential vitality, social exploration and innovation in the books we publish. Unless we tackle this lack of inclusivity, the mountains marginalised writers must climb in order to get and stay published, we may never reach our true potential as an industry.”
Read The First Chapter Of Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’
Or listen to Reese Witherspoon reading it.
The Science Fiction Novel That Changed The World: ‘Dune’ At 50
“Though [it] won the Nebula and Hugo awards, the two most prestigious science fiction prizes, it was not an overnight commercial success. … Fifty years later it is considered by many to be the greatest novel in the SF canon, and has sold in millions around the world.”
Man Booker International And Independent Foreign Fiction Prizes Merge To Create Super-Award
Instead of being biennial, it will be annual. And instead of rewarding a body of work, it will be awarded on the basis of a single book translated into English and published in the UK. Novels and short story collections will be eligible. The prize money will also be increased with a top prize of £50,000.
Book Subscription Services Have A Problem: People Who Read Too Much
“Many hands have been wrung over the decline of the American book lover. According to a Gallup poll, the number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978. And according to the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of American adults have not read a single book in the past year. But the challenge for e-book services are people who like to read too much.”
The Essential Ingredient For A Successful Lit Magazine
“You can use several different measuring sticks to say whether a litmag “succeeds”: longevity, financial stability, influence on new writers, number of readers, number of imitators launching journals very much like your own. But all these kinds of success come down to whether your journal brings something new to its scene.”
Why The World Loves Southern Gothic Lit
Novelist M.O. Walsh (from Louisiana): “Here’s my idea: the southern gothic is like a trusty bicycle. (Note: this is not simply because southerners talk too slowly for a car metaphor to work. It is instead a kinship in the way the two things are assembled and ornamented. Stay with me.)”
We Have Discovered The Owner Of William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow
“For decades, much has depended on his red wheelbarrow, streaked with rain, next to some white chickens, even if no one has known – or perhaps even wondered – exactly who he was.” Now, at last, poetic justice can be done.
How Digital Analysis Is Changing The Study Of Literature
In the past decade, digital scholarship has gone from being a quirky corner of the humanities to a mainstream phenomenon, restructuring funding landscapes and pushing tenure committees to develop new protocols for accrediting digital projects. As the stakes have grown, so has an expectation about the role that the “digital turn” might play in revivifying the humanities, effecting a synthesis with the sciences, and other weighty causes.