Tweet Stokes Speculation About Nobel Lit Nominations "Speculation about the shortlist began almost at once, even though the winner of this year's Nobel prize in literature won't be announced until October. 195 names were submitted in March for consideration, including 48 first-timers." The Telegraph (UK) 05/22/13

email this story | Posted 05/21/13@09:58AM

Stephen King Passes On E-Publishing For Print "I have no plans for a digital version. Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one." The Telegraph (UK) 05/21/13

email this story | Posted 05/21/13@09:52AM

Wole Soyinka Says Chinua Achebe Was Not The Father Of African Literature "As you yourself have observed, Chinua himself repudiated such a tag - he did study literature after all, bagged a degree in the subject. So, it is a tag of either literary ignorance or 'momentary exuberance' - ala [Nadine] Gordimer - to which we are all sometimes prone." SaharaReporters 05/18/13

email this story | Posted 05/21/13@12:59AM

Shakespeare's Sonnets Get Their Own iPhone App "The free app, which is downloadable from the Apple store, is a multimedia experience that includes short videos of actors reciting the sonnets. New videos will be released on a rolling basis, shot on different locations throughout New York." Los Angeles Times 05/20/13

email this story | Posted 05/21/13@12:58AM

Ireland's Newest Stamp Features An Entire Short Story "The bright yellow rectangle includes all 224 words of [teenager] Eoin Moore's short story which strives to capture the 'essence' of the capital. It was chosen from a host of works completed by participants in Dublin's Fighting Words creative writing programme." The Journal (Ireland) 05/16/13

email this story | Posted 05/21/13@12:55AM

Organizing Books (It's Not As Easy As Non-Bibliophiles Might Think) "The most valuable books also have to be kept away from direct sunlight, which means not-so- valuable books that were once alphabetically ordered then have to go near the window." The Guardian (UK) 05/19/13

email this story | Posted 05/19/13@08:41PM

Why Is Gray's 'Elegy' Such A Powerful Meditation On Death? "A recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations draws from 15 stanzas and reproduces 13 of them whole." The Wall Street Journal 05/17/13

email this story | Posted 05/19/13@10:28AM

Intellectual Foodie Parody Performance Art, By Michael Pollan "What he has decided to do with this broad and influential platform is to turn inward, describing his thought process as he labors over wood fires and onions or as he lobbies for the approval of his bread-baking mentor with a 'crumb shot' of his homemade sourdough." The Smart Set 05/16/13

email this story | Posted 05/19/13@09:30AM

The Making Of An Audiobook "If professional voice actors can flop, some amateurs can be surprisingly good." The New York Times 05/17/13

email this story | Posted 05/19/13@09:23AM

Amazon Pushing Boundaries To Evade UK Taxes: Investigation "MPs are ready to haul Amazon back to parliament to answer new questions about its tax status in Britain after a Guardian investigation ... found Amazon pushing definitions close to breaking point; and tax authorities unable, or unwilling, to prevent the imposition of aggressive tax avoidance structures." The Guardian (UK) 05/15/13

email this story | Posted 05/17/13@12:58AM

Michigan School Declines To Ban Anne Frank's Diary For Being 'Pornographic' Northville, Michigan's "assistant superintendent for instructional services Robert Behnke wrote a letter to the community regarding the school's decision, stating that the committee worried that removing the book would constitute as censorship." New York Daily News 05/13/13

email this story | Posted 05/17/13@12:54AM

US E-Book Sales Nearly Doubled In 2012 "The total revenue generated by e-book sales in the U.S. in 2012 was $3.04 billion, a 44.2% increase over the year before. ... And the increase in e-book sales did not take a bite out of print books - at least, not in the aggregate. Print sales were $12 billion in 2012; they were $12 billion in 2011, too." Los Angeles Times 05/15/13

email this story | Posted 05/17/13@12:53AM

Would You Want To Be Friends With Humbert Humbert? On Literary Characters' Likeability "[Inspired by Claire Messud's recent outburst,] we surveyed a group of novelists - Donald Antrim, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and Tessa Hadley - asking them how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters ... and why this persists as a criteria for so many readers." The New Yorker 05/16/13

email this story | Posted 05/17/13@12:44AM

Amazon Sees Its First-Ever Strike, In Germany "Employees at two huge distribution warehouses, in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig, launched the one-day strike, the giant services sector union Ver.di said. Ver.di is demanding that Amazon's 9,000 workers in Germany be paid according to a wage deal in place for the retail and mail-order industries." The Guardian (UK) 05/14/13

email this story | Posted 05/16/13@12:58AM

Margaret Atwood On Utopias And Dystopias Science fiction tends to locate itself in one or the other; Atwood, looking back to the 19th century, talks about why. Slate 05/13/13 (audio)

email this story | Posted 05/16/13@12:46AM

Do We Still Need Public Libraries? "The relevance of these gloriously inflated book boxes is being questioned in an age that looks to the Internet for its intellectual resources." The Wall Street Journal 05/15/13

email this story | Posted 05/15/13@07:26AM

Hemingway's Cuban Archives To Become Available In US "While most Americans have never seen Ernest Hemingway's home in Cuba where he wrote some of his most famous books, a set of 2,000 recently digitized records delivered to the United States will give scholars and the public a fuller view of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist's life." AP 05/06/13

email this story | Posted 05/15/13@12:53AM

Barnes & Noble's Discounted Nook Sells Out In UK "After dropping the price of their Nook Simple Touch (I'm pretty sure it's called the Nouk Simple Touch across the pond) from £79 to £29, Barnes & Noble has seen 'unprecedented demand' for the ereader and, as a result, they're sold out in 'almost all retail locations.'" Melville House 05/14/13

email this story | Posted 05/15/13@12:52AM

Dan Brown's Latest Book Is Already Atop The Bestseller Lists And It Hasn't Been Released (Here's How) "A book that commands this much anticipation comes with a heavy amount of foreshadowing -- including, in this case, a social-media tease surrounding the title, arcane mathematical symbolism around the publication date and a virtual lockdown of its international translators." CBC 05/13/13

email this story | Posted 05/14/13@07:12AM

The Librotraficantes Of Arizona A 2010 Arizona law "that prohibited school districts from offering courses that, among other things, 'promoted resentment toward any race or class" and "advocated ethnic solidarity instead of being individuals.' ... [led to] the removal of books from school libraries, including such incendiary texts as The Tempest." Enter the book traffickers ... Melville House 05/13/13

email this story | Posted 05/14/13@12:58AM

When Translators Encounter The Unexpected - And Misread It "One of the intriguing aspects when teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn't expect them to say." Tim Parks offers examples - from D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Niccolò Machiavelli - of when translators changed the meaning of sentences without, apparently, even realizing it. The New York Review of Books 05/09/13

email this story | Posted 05/14/13@12:57AM

The Great Gatsby - Can The Movie Work As Well As Cliff's Notes? "For whatever reason, Gatsby was consigned to my particular version of the list of classic books one pretends to have read while making small talk at dinner parties. My status as a Gatsby virgin, though personally embarrassing, proved useful to my editors." J. Bryan Lowder takes a multiple-choice test and tries to write a high-school essay on the book after seeing Baz Luhrmann's film version. Slate 05/13/13

email this story | Posted 05/14/13@12:48AM

Rethinking Digital Piracy "If you're a publisher, copy protection is all that stops the pirates from freely circulating your goods. Your revenue will crash. Maybe you'll go out of business. But there's another school of thought, which says that nobody pirates software except cash-poor kids who wouldn't have bought it anyway." The New York Times 05/12/13

email this story | Posted 05/13/13@09:46AM

Is *Anyone* Making Money Publishing Online? Maybe. (Well, probably. It's a little fuzzy though.) CNNMoney 05/10/13

email this story | Posted 05/12/13@06:49PM

Let's Say Barnes & Noble Sells The Nook To Microsoft. What's Left? "Barnes & Noble would lose the unit that added attention and store traffic...and kept its stock higher. It's not a clear parallel yet to Borders, but it's hard to ignore the comparison." Forbes 05/09/13

email this story | Posted 05/12/13@09:35AM

Dan Brown Is Crying All The Way To The Bank "The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn't sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment's thought." The Telegraph (UK) 05/10/13

email this story | Posted 05/12/13@09:25AM

Gormenghast: The Cult Classic Novels Are Actually About The Modern World "What they show is that it's the modern age that's based on fantasy. If we know anything, it's that our actions will produce a world that's quite different from anything we can presently foresee or imagine." BBC 05/10/13

email this story | Posted 05/12/13@09:13AM

Bored Characters Who Don't Bore Readers "The first of my five favourite tediums is Jane Eyre (1847) pacing up and down the third storey at Thornfield Hall, longing for a bigger life and 'a power of vision which might overpass that limit.'" The Telegraph (UK) 05/12/13

email this story | Posted 05/12/13@08:56AM

Why D.H. Lawrence, Misogynist Male Author, Has Lots Of Female Fans "For these women, Lawrence's embrace of gender is not a bug; it's a feature. Acknowledging the way gender matters to ideas isn't (or rather, isn't only) about imposing hierarchy based on which bits you happen to have. It's also about affirming the weirdness and power and centrality of bodies - and of those people who have traditionally been most associated with bodies, which is to say, women." The Atlantic 05/08/13

email this story | Posted 05/10/13@12:59AM

Haruki Murakami On Why He Translated The Great Gatsby "To the best of my recollection, I was in my late thirties when I started telling people I was going to translate The Great Gatsby when I turned sixty. ... Metaphorically speaking, I had placed Gatsby securely on my kamidana, the high shelf that serves as a household shrine to the Shinto gods, and then lived my life glancing up at it from time to time." Scribd 05/13

email this story | Posted 05/10/13@12:52AM

Coming Out Of The Closet As A Gatsby Hater Kathryn Schulz: "I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them - but not this book." New York Magazine 05/06/13

email this story | Posted 05/10/13@12:51AM

Blame Game - Art Of The Literary Feud "If you get a bad review and you're from Newfoundland, it's because of geography; if you get a bad review and you're a woman, it's because of gender. Here's a recent example of how this works." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/08/13

email this story | Posted 05/09/13@12:38PM

Remember The Whole Earth Catalog? "Though it wasn't exactly a book, it was a how-to manual, a compendium, an enyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers' recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry. ... [It] came to be the magnum opus of the entire counterculture." The Observer (UK) 05/05/13

email this story | Posted 05/09/13@12:44AM

How Crowdsourced Personalization Could Save Publishing "Personalization is as much a buzzword nowadays as disruption, big data, or the cloud. It might also be part of the solution to pull the publishing industry out of the downward revenue spiral it's been stuck in for years." Wired 05/07/13

email this story | Posted 05/08/13@04:22AM

Mother Demands Michigan School District Censor 'Pornographic' Anne Frank Diary "According to one Michigan mother, the unedited version of the landmark account of a young girl's life during the Holocaust is inappropriate for 7th-graders because of a scene in which Frank discusses her female anatomy." International Business Times 04/29/13

email this story | Posted 05/08/13@12:54AM

More And More US Cities (Even Fresno!) Appoint Poets Laureate "For many poets, and those in the poetry business, the popularity of poets laureate - those who labor over words to sing a community's virtues or plumb its psyche in an age defined by Twitter messages - is a pleasant surprise. Why now, though, remains something of a mystery." The New York Times 05/08/13

email this story | Posted 05/08/13@12:51AM

Translators Of Dan Brown's Inferno Confined In Underground Bunker simultaneously that they hired 11 translators from France, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Italy to translate it intensively between February and April 2012. The translators are said to have worked seven days a week until at least 8pm, in a windowless, high-security basement." The Independent (UK) 05/07/13

email this story | Posted 05/08/13@12:45AM

UK Academics Protesting Education Cuts Are Themselves Dinged For Bad Grammar "The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing." The Guardian (UK) 05/06/13

email this story | Posted 05/07/13@06:30AM

How Much Have This Year's Pulitzer Prizes Helped Book Sales? "Two weeks after the 2013 Pulitzers were announced, all five winning books have, in fact, seen an increase in sales. The numbers, however, are woefully underwhelming." Christian Science Monitor 04/30/13

email this story | Posted 05/07/13@12:56AM

How Sequestration Threatens The Library Of Congress "Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works -- whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins -- to the collection, preservation and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission." The New York Times 05/03/13

email this story | Posted 05/06/13@04:45AM