June 2009
34 posts
What Can a Seven-year-old Documentary About a Rock... →
“Which brings us to another point: if a content company (in this case a record label, but you could easily sub in a publisher) isn’t going to provide risk capital, what are they going to do for an artist?”
Steve Hely on the Future of Publishing →
“2) Readership. The media landscape is getting a lot more crowded, and there’ll be a lot more competition for eyeballs. Remember when every single person on a plane was reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead? When the subway floors were strewn with used copies of Ha Jin’s War Trash, and on Saturday night at bars it seemed like everybody was arguing over which was their favorite Alice Munro...
“Granby College had, at great expense and with enormous fanfare, hired away from...”
– From Steve Hely’s very funny novel How I Became a Famous Novelist
I figure this is sort of apropos of my earlier post on the Oscars and the NBA.
(Okay, back to the neverending Michael Jackson posts.)
Why the National Book Awards should follow Oscar's... →
“I wonder how much of this shift is a response to the way we now view criticism. With the decline in influence of newspaper movie critics and the rise of aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, perhaps the Academy was responding to the notion that the public has a great say in what a “good movie” is. I’m not sure I agree with this idea, but it’s interesting...
For Reference
raptoravatar:
If you give Transformers 2 money this weekend, you are part of the problem.
Don’t.
See The Hurt Locker, if that’s an option.
Feed a homeless or hungry person.
Spend the money on beer and reconnect with an old friend.
Buy cigarettes for a child.
Hell, try crack with the money. You probably haven’t tried crack.
Just don’t encourage them to make a third Transformers.
Or just...
Watchthesapling:
Los Angeles, j’adore!
Oh, God. This would be awesome if it weren’t my neighborhood, but, well…
“Megan Fox is a magical Disney cartoon, a Jessica Rabbit run wild, and she...”
– Flicked Off: ‘Transformers 2: The Revenge of Megan Fox’s Rack’ | The Awl
What if this is It?
I wrote a quick link dump of a blog post yesterday, pointing people toward Kunkel’s n+1 piece “Lingering” as well as Emily Gould’s excellent “Why I Write for Free.” Someone left a comment to the post wondering aloud wether the internet helped or hindered his creativity. (Click here to read the comments.) He seemed to come down, more or less, on the side of the...
Kate Christensen's Trouble →
“Reading Christensen’s prose is an almost painfully intense and exhilarating experience. This is normal and caused by the fact that she is smarter and funnier and more painfully honest than most other writers: she’ll say things most people won’t dare to. And she knows just how to say them.”
She’s going to be at our store in a week. Just sayin.
Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number... →
I know I bang the Amazon drum quite a lot around here, but it’s only because the rest of the internet is busy making come-hither eyes at Jeff Bezos. Wake up, people.
Amazon wants to own how you read →
“No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there’s a Steve Jobs of books, it’s Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.”
As is the...
For Bloomsday: Novels That Happen in a Single Day →
There are some really surprising books on this list, including Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code. My personal favorite from this category of literature is Saul Bellow’s heartbreaking novella Seize the Day. What’s your favorite book that happens in a single day?
An outstanding profile of Joe Meno at The Millions →
“There’s a sameness to the book covers… there’s an aesthetic sameness to the way books are being sold, the kind of books that are put out, the content. There’s a sameness to the background of the writers - how many novelists graduated from Columbia… or Iowa. There’s a sameness to the style, and what New York publishing deems serious. [The style] is heavily...
For those of you on Twitter...
kaytee:
shorterexcerpts:
Change your twitter settings to say you are in the Tehran timezone, and change your location to Tehran.
Iranian censors are filtering by these settings to find dissidents, by doing this you can make things a bit more difficult for them.
Awesome idea. Just like in Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother.
What Are Your Favorite Remixed Books? →
Books based on other books.
Interview with Emily St. John Mandel →
If you liked the trailer I just posted, be sure to listen to the interview, too. (I promise this will be the last Emily Mandel-related post for a bit.)
Watchgary:
Talking to publishers and Indie book stores I spoke to a bunch of people in the book world a few hours before Misha was born, here is what I had to say!
If you have a small business, you need to watch this video. Gary gets it so right here. Very inspirational, I think.
Emily St. John Mandel writes Book Notes at... →
I’m a huge fan of Emily’s novel Last Night in Montreal. It comes out today. Buy it (from Vroman’s, if you’d like)!
Great Post About Books as Phsyical Objects →
“For a period, novelist Katherine Taylor brought The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier to dinner parties. “Wine is boring,” she told me. “Books last longer.” Later, she took to giving everyone Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, which, she said, “is not as dinner-party appropriate, but it was a gorgeous and largely overlooked book I thought my clever friends...
Vroman's Podcast 7: Alice Hoffman →
