- Garth, Ben, Andrew and Max appear in today’s “Digest” at The Morning News. The topic is movies based on books. Also at TMN: the Tournament of Books is underway.
- Readers with an interest in sales figures for books and their drawbacks should take a look at the comments of our follow-up post on the Beautiful Children free book promotion. Several anonymous commenters, whom one suspects are probably industry insiders, have shared their insights.
- A quick but interesting interview with Paul Theroux. This summer, Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star will be published. In it, he retraces his path from The Great Railway Bazaar thirty years ago. (via)
- The National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced. In the fiction category, Junot Díaz took home the prize for The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz was a part of our Year in Reading in December.
- The finalists have been announced for the Kiriyama Prize, which recognizes books that “relate in some significant way to the Pacific Rim or South Asia, to a particular culture or part(s) of these regions, or to people from these regions.” Among them is I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, which was reviewed here by Ben, from which a blurb was used on the Kiriyama Prize site.
- The Stranger reminds us of our bookselling days, chasing those damn book thieves down the street.
- The Observer reports on two new bylines arriving at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy of the New York Times and New York respectively. (via)
- Literary frauds are all over the news again, and the LA Times serves up a delightful accounting of hoaxers going all the way back to the 1700s. (via)
- We are all stereotypical readers: “The British buy books by television personalities, Americans are obsessed with self-improvement, French choices are more highbrow, the Germans like holidays while the Japanese have more eclectic tastes.” (via)
- A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is out. Among the offerings: over- and underrated books and Sam J. Miller’s essay positing that short stories are far from dead, as some big names would have you think.
- Apple head honcho Steve Jobs told the New York Times in January that “people don’t read anymore.” The Raleigh Quarerly took umbrage and is now holding a contest that asks for submissions “featuring a main character named, uh, Steve, who reads something that transforms his life.”
Curiosities
2 comments:
Add Your Comment:
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Thanks for pointing me to the Sam Miller blog post. I too am fed up with reports about the death of the short story. Just take a look at how many short story collections are being published this year (The Short Review's ever-expanding list). Hundreds and hundreds. And that is even with editors' and publishers' apparent disinterest in collections. Now we just have to make sure they get read.
Tania
Editor
The The Short Review
Thanks for tipping off folks to the Steve Jobs Gets Right with Reading contest at The Raleigh Quarterly. The irony of launching a new online magazine when the world's most powerful Steves (that'd be Jobs and King) are down on the rite of reading isn't lost even on us earnest folks at the RQ. But we believe that while distribution channels change almost as frequently as slang, certain things endure — like the need to connect through story. We plan to deliver those sweet sensations in our April debut, while experimenting with delivery. So please, let us know what you want in an online magazine … http://www.raleighquarterly.com. Again, thanks!
Billy
The RQ