Category: words

After a book hackathon in London: “This has to be the beginning of a long marriage between these two worlds and not just the post-coital euphoria of a dirty weekend.”

“Each stave has bonus content – an audio reading, an essay by the author. It’s free to subscribe: readers pay for the story after they’ve read it. Once a book gets 5,000 subscribers, a print edition will be published.”

“Nicknamed La Mamá Grande, after a story by Gabriel García Márquez, she served as a confidante and coach, someone who paid her writers’ dentist bills and deftly resolved their domestic problems while promoting the greatest Latin American and Spanish authors across the globe, including Mr. García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and many more.”

“Poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.”

“Naive as this sounds, doesn’t a bookseller as large as Amazon have a moral responsibility to books? In its early days, founder Bezos saw books more as a foothold for Amazon than a future. But by virtue of its size now, isn’t a business that built its reputation on the back of words obligated not to impede the spread of books?”

“It is precisely because Hachette has been so successful in selling its ebooks through Amazon that it can’t afford to walk away from the retailer. By allowing Amazon to put a lock on its products whose key only Amazon possessed, Hachette has allowed Amazon to utterly usurp its relationship with its customers.”

“Third Place Books hand-delivered copies of The Silkworm yesterday around the Seattle metro area to 20 customers. (Dozens of other customers pre-ordered from Third Place and chose to pick up the books in the stores.)”

“Anyone who, like Philip Roth, observes how peripheral literature has become to the common culture might regard the victory for freedom of expression as pyrrhic. If everything goes, does anything matter?”

“It was the kind of story that could bankrupt a writer. I’d now devoted five months to writing and peddling “Boom” and wasn’t even halfway to earning out my $2,000 advance (less than the overrun on my travel). The cruelest joke, though, was that 700 to 800 copies made “Boom” a top-rated seller.”

After having assigned, respectively, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the anthology Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, “the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina-Upstate will have to spend $52,000 and $17,000, respectively, to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents, ‘including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals’.”