Continuing its dabbling in content, Amazon has now collected its author interviews, essays, and other tidbits into one section called The Backstory.
Amazon’s Backstory
Dead Men May Tell Tales
“The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule.” The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there’s a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.
The Cool Kids
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God, CEO of Heaven
Here’s the story of one entrepreneur so intent on disrupting the antiquated status quo within his industry that he quit his organization and set out to found his own start-up. You’ve heard this story before. It’s John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and supposedly it can help your career in ways you haven’t even realized.
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The Economy of Goodwill
Recommended Reading: Against crowdfunding websites that marketize goodwill.
Tuesday New Release Day: Sheck; Yoshimoto; Manning; Axat; Norton
New this week: Island of the Mad by Laurie Sheck; Moshi-Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto; One Man’s Dark by Maurice Manning; Kill the Next One by Federico Axat; and Loveland by Graham Norton. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
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DeWitt Talks Lightning Rods
Recommended Weekend Podcast: Helen DeWitt talks with Anne Strainchamps about her novel Lightning Rods, which we at The Millions loved a lot.
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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.