Sharpen your pencils freelance book reviewers: The Wall Street Journal plans to buck the trend of disappearing book review sections by launching a weekly pull-out. Robert Messenger will edit. The New York Observer takes note of the storylines in play: Rupert Murdoch once again bucking conventional wisdom, The WSJ trying to go head to head with The New York Times in yet another high-profile venue.
A New Book Review
Pictures Made of Words
Pictures made of words: Hang your favorite book on the wall with the complete text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book. (via @Harvard_Press)
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Make the Canadians Face Off Against Everybody Else, Too
“Nurturing eventually becomes coddling, and now it’s time to encourage that work to take a bigger stage,” writes Jared Bland in his plea for the Griffin Poetry Prize to combine its two categories – Canadian and English-language – into one, global whole.
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A Japanese Country Doctor
Recommended viewing: Kafka's "A Country Doctor" translated into Japanese animation.
That Old Imperial Impulse
"The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of 'imaginative power,' and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left." Jonathan Sturgeon in The Baffler on American exceptionalism and "the imperial self" in fiction, with particular attention paid to the work of two other Jonathans, Franzen and Safran Foer.
Zen and the Art of Headlines
This handy guide from The Week shows how to identify which website a headline comes from, from Gawker to The New York Times. Pair with Janet Potter's Millions piece on rewriting book titles to get more clicks.
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The Revolution Will Not Be E-Read
According to some new research conducted by ebook retailer Kobo, the digital reading revolution (if it still exists) is being powered by prolific readers who are primarily female and older than forty-five. The study asserts that women make up almost seventy-five percent of "active" e-readers, defined as those who spend more than thirty minutes per day reading. What does all of this mean? Who knows, but keep reading.
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