Authors now have more Amazon sales ranking data to obsess over. Weekly Nielsen BookScan data is now available to authors for free through their “Author Central” area. (press release)
More Amazon Sales Ranking Crack
Writing Writing
When you want to distinguish fiction and poetry writing from academic work or journalism, you use a straightforward term: creative writing. But what if that term is not the one you should use? At Slate, an article on the subject by Cydney Alexis, originally published by Inside Higher Ed.
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Batuman in Conversation
For Angelenos: Elif Batuman will be reading from The Possessed tonight at 7:00 at the LAPL Central Library. A conversation with LA Times Books Editor David Ulin follows the reading. More information and reservations here (tickets are free).
Jericho Brown and the South
Award-winning poet Jericho Brown discusses how the ongoing push and pull of the South continue to fuel his powerful work.
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Why Art Matters
At the Guardian, Alain de Botton, author of the forthcoming Religion for Atheists, considers whether “museums of art are our new churches” and says “modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters.”
“A Imperfect Dad”
“As much as I claimed that I read for my own edification, it was a lie. The books I was most drawn to were those that were loved by someone in my life. Reading them, I thought, would teach me all I needed to know about them—nice and safe, from a distance. Reading them with one hand, it was easy to have the other keep them at arm’s length.” Romy Sugden writes for The Oyster Review about trying to connect with her estranged father by reading John le Carré‘s A Perfect Spy.
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Dispatches from Guangzhou
Take a vicarious trip to China via a special issue of Ninth Letter, a literary and arts journal published by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Including work by authors Madelaine Thien and Khaled Al Khamissi, the issue grew out of a residency sponsored by Sun Yat-sen University’s Center for English-language Creative Writing, the only such department of its kind in that country. Pair with this piece by Casey Walker about writing his novel Last Days in Shanghai, which is set in the boomtown of today’s new China.
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Miss Grief
Who was Constance Fenimore Woolson? It’s about time everybody learned about this late nineteenth-century woman of letters who was a close friend and contemporary of none other than Henry James.
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