Loudpoet has an interview with former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash about his new social publishing venture Cursor. ““Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.” Is this a way forward for beleaguered publishers? (via The Lone Gunman)
Is Social Publishing the Future?
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Icon and Author
Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
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Dictionary Panics
Recommended reading: on dictionary-related panics from The New Yorker. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s Millions essay “Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.”
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The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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“He says, ‘their hearts should be burned.’”
Jeff Sharlet traveled to Russia because he “wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that ‘homosexualism’ is a threat to its ‘sexual sovereignty.’” What he found was unsettling and terrifying, but the courage of the LGBT community members he interviewed is also incredibly inspiring. Set aside time to read this one. It’s essential.
Something Whole
“The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders,” the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because “despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end.”
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The Ball Is a Woman
“Now I get paid to do something I have loved since I was 4 years old. Other than my family, is there anything else I have loved so unconditionally, for so long?” Georgia Cloepfil in N+1 on the uncompromising, compromised life of the professional female athlete. See also: some thoughts about hosting the World Cup.
Nash appeared on a panel titled “The Future of the Book” at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend, 2009. The other two panelists were former Atlanta Journal-Constitution book section editor Teresa Weaver and University of Georgia Press sales and marketing director John McLeod. He was the only one to discuss new options for internet book marketing, and received the most questions from the audience. Will enough people pay to make social writing clubs viable? What will he charge and how many subscribers will it take to make it worthwhile? Will his business model then be adopted by other now-free sites (folks like Max)? Could Nash be the internet equivalent of the guy who invented barbed wire (and tamed the wild west)? At the time he was still wooing investors (he told the audience). (Photos of panel here: http://tiny.cc/H3c4S or search http://www.flickr.com/groups/dbf09/).