“Tell me, what do you think is the most common reason given for cancelling a subscription ebook service like Oyster? If you answered ‘I can’t find the ebooks I want’ then you won the prize. … But now Oyster can promise to sell the ebooks which it was unable to lend, and that is going to keep some subscribers from leaving.”
Category: words
How I Found Georges Perec’s Lost Novel
David Bellos: “Preparing for [a] move in spring 1966, [Perec] stuffed redundant paperwork into a cardboard suitcase intended for the dump, and put his literary papers in a different case of similar appearance. In the move, the wrong case got junked. All of Perec’s manuscripts and typescripts prior to the writing of Things disappeared. The story led me to expect I would never get to read those lost works.”
What Kind Of “Truths” Should We Expect In Poetry?
“In general, one does not look to poems for factual truths, lest Keats’s Cortez be permanently swapped for Balboa in the history books. But if poetry proves largely unsatisfactory to Plato and Detective Sergeant Joe “Just the facts, ma’am” Friday in terms of veracity, then what kind of truth is poetry after?”
The French Are Buying A Lot Of Books About Islam These Days
“Books on Islam are selling out in France after deadly extremist attacks in the capital raised uncomfortable questions about Europe’s fastest-growing religion.”
Atticus Lish Wins PEN/Faulkner Award
In their citation, the judges wrote that Preparation for the Next Life “scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates. The result is an incantation, a song of ourselves, a shout.”
Is The Quote On The New Stamp Honoring Maya Angelou Misattributed?
According to Postal Service spokesman Mark Saunders, the post office’s research team said the quote had “come up in different media interviews Maya Angelou had done” and that using it had been approved by her family members. He didn’t know which ones.
That Time Salman Rushdie Had No Idea How Goodreads Worked
“Rushdie, who won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children and had a fatwa placed upon him upon the publication of The Satanic Verses, awarded Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis one star, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird just three.”
Filming All Of Shakespeare’s Sonnets In New York
“Williams tried matching sonnets with locations based on their ‘imagery and rhetorical arguments,’ pairing, for example, the legal-minded Sonnet 46 with the State Supreme Court building.”
A Right-Wing Backlash Floods The Hugo Awards
“This new slate can only really be understood against the backdrop of ongoing, vicious fights over racism in science fiction.”
BuzzFeed – Yes, BuzzFeed – Is Launching Writers’ Fellowships And A Literary Magazine
Poet Saeed Jones: “The fellowship is just the beginning of what I really like to think of as a kind of literary movement coming to BuzzFeed. In addition to the fellowship program, I’ll be launching a literary magazine — about a year from now — as well as a reading and salon series. We’ll also be hosting creative writing workshops.”