New this week: Paul Auster’s latest, Sunset Park; a new collection of short stories from Stephen King called Full Dark, No Stars; The Memory Hole, a memoir by the historian Tony Judt who recently died from ALS (the essays collected here appeared in recent months in the New York Review of Books); and the latest obligatory obfuscatory presidential memoir Decision Points.
Tuesday New Release Day: Auster, King, Judt, Bush
Is That a Manuscript in Your Pants, or…?
“Success in writing takes serious commitment and a willingness to devote thousands of hours to the craft of having sex with key publishing professionals.”
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Grammatical Tweets
Are birds’ tweets grammatical? According to a recent study by Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University, songbirds may communicate using sophisticated grammar.
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Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
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a hectic, unblanced life
D.T. Max’s forthcoming David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, has been excerpted in Newsweeek magazine, and you can read it online.
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Adults These Days
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 75% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read at least one print book in the past year. The same can be said for only 64% of Americans aged 30 and older.
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Inside Litball
“Bertelsmann’s 7% decline in 2016 revenue was due entirely to a drop in sales at Penguin Random House. The lack of a big new bestseller hurt results at the company, and it divested some smaller divisions in the year.” For those interested in inside baseball, Publishers Weekly takes a look at how the world’s 50 largest publishers are faring. (TL;dr: Although their total revenue topped $50 billion, more than half of the list’s publishers reported sales declines – oh, and Harry Potter still really, really sells). As a counterpoint to all that capitalism, read our own Edan Lepucki‘s survey of self-published authors.
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