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
Perfect Punctuation
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The Flying Dutchmen
This Sunday, the Netherlands will take on Mexico in the second stage of the 2014 World Cup. To explain what makes the Dutchmen so formidable on the soccer pitch, Rowan Ricardo Phillips takes a look at the many “Shades of Oranje.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Barnes, Lahiri, Oz, Erdrich
Out this week: Levels of Life by Julian Barnes; The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; Between Friends by Amos Oz; and a new paperback edition of The Round House by Louise Erdrich. For more information on these books and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2013 Book Preview.
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Bookstore MFA
“There’s something about shopping for books where you’re open for anything. You’re faced with a wall of books, and you don’t know anything about most of them. At some point, it’s just you and the poems.” Carl Adamshick talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about Powell’s and the “bookstore MFA.” Pair with our own Janet Potter‘s essay on loving bookshops.
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Pulling an Updike
Authors are known to mine material from their personal relationships for their writing, but John Updike found inspiration from his interviews. After journalist William Ecenbarger wrote a profile of Updike in 1983, he found himself the subject of an Updike short story. Pair with: Our review of Updike’s Collected Stories.
Great Divides
In the nineties, when Jack Livings was teaching English in China, he was gathering material for The Dog, his short story collection that recently won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize. In an interview in the WSJ, he talks about his research process, Chinese idioms and Uighur-Han relations. You could also read Casey Walker’s syllabus for modern China. (h/t The Rumpus)