In the LRB, an amiable Julian Barnes joins in the ritual cavilling that must greet any retranslation of a masterpiece. But who’s complaining? It’s an excuse to read 6,000 words on Madame Bovary !
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Waxwing Debuts
Waxwing, a new literary journal, has published its first issue online. The journal’s editors state that their mission is “to include American writers from all cultural identities — in terms of race, ethnicity, indigenous tribe, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, ability, language, religion, and region — alongside international voices, published bilingually.”
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Bookstore Pricing Wars
E-book pricing wars continue. Sony tries to hit the Kindle where it hurts by offering cheaper e-books. Meanwhile, $0 is becoming an important price point at the Kindle store.
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R. L. Stine Revisited
Eat Cheese and Die Happy!: an R. L. Stine title for my life. See more at McSweeney’s by Amanda Rosenberg.
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Passions, Hobbies. Same Thing, Right?
It’s the weekend, and you know what that means. Time to explore your creative passions. That’s right! Find what you want to do and “dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.”
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The 80-page Rule
How do you know if the book you’re writing is going to fly or flop? Try writing the first 80 pages without worrying about the outcome as Meg Wolitzer does. “Eighty pages is enough pages for a writer to feel she’s accomplished something, but it’s not so many pages that, if she decides to put aside the book, she’ll feel as if she’s wasted her life,” she told the Daily Beast for its “How I Write” series. It must work because we loved The Interestings.
Prehistoric Fairy Tales
Discovery of the Week: Fairy tales are older than previously thought. Researchers have traced stories back to prehistoric and bronze age times. For example, Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin “can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2,500 and 6,000 years ago.” Kirsty Logan writes about the problem with fairy tales.
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Leonard Cohen in Love
Leonard Cohen's love letters to Marianne Ihlen, which also described the writing and publication of Cohen's novels, recently sold for a whopping $876,000.
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