In Salon, Laura Miller discusses the brave new world of self-publishing: “You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial.”
Laura Miller on Self-Publishing
The Mediated Games.
With the close of the London 2012 Olympic Games come the media think pieces, including this one from The Atlantic, which collects some of its best memes. And this one, on the use of the gif in digital sports coverage, in the Nieman Journalism Lab, and here’s Kevin Nguyen championing BuzzFeed for their Olympics coverage. Also, The Spice Girls.
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Culture Club
Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
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She Has Haunted Me in Spectacular Ways
“Lillian haunted me when she was alive. And she has haunted me since her death in July 2015. And she has haunted me in spectacular ways since I published my memoir a month ago.” Sherman Alexie has cancelled the rest of a book tour to promote his new memoir about his relationship with his mother, reports The Guardian. See also: our interview with Ellen Forney, who illustrated Alexie’s National Book Award-winning YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Just Like Christmas
Good news for Catch-22 fans: a previously unpublished Joseph Heller story appears in the newest issue of Strand Magazine. (h/t Paris Review)
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Chasing After Literature
What is it like to work for a major book publisher? In an excerpt from the new reprint of her My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum discusses the myth of the glamorous editorial job, one in which no time is wasted reading self-help books and unauthorized biographies of cable stars. As she explains it, “We’re secretaries fully versed in Derrida, receptionists who have read Proust in French.” Also check out our own Hannah Gersen’s review of Daum’s latest essay collection The Unspeakable.
Eleanor & Park & Censorship
Right on the edge of Banned Books Week, Rainbow Rowell discusses when Minneapolis’s Anoka-Hennepin school district, the county board, and the local library board censored her from coming to speak about her YA novel Eleanor & Park. “When these people call Eleanor & Park an obscene story, I feel like they’re saying that rising above your situation isn’t possible,” she says.
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