Amanda Hocking, 26-year-old self-publishing wunderkind, earns a New York Times Magazine profile describing her road to a $2 million deal with St. Martins for rights to her ten novels including My Blood Approves and Hollowland.
Amanda Hocking Gets the Times Magazine Treatment
A Holiday with Strangers
Another holiday, another Jon Cotner holiday slideshow. Here he and his wife took to the streets of New York City and “asked 25 strangers to tell [them] their holiday wish.” (Previously.)
The New World hits virtual shelves
Chris Adrian’s The New World, a digital-platform book we wrote about before, is now on shelves. I mean that idiomatically and not literally — as none of the editions favored by The Atavist’s young publishing arm for this lyrical love story of life after death (interactive ebook app, text-only Kindle/iBook/Google) involve paper.
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The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
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Stellar Memoir
Maclean’s has an excerpt from Chris Hadfield’s forthcoming memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.
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Drinking JJS While Reading JJS
One of the best parts of last month’s Cullman Center discussion between John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower was watching JJS carry on the conversation while sipping from a highball glass of whiskey. The essayist’s Southern roots and Irish ancestry of course make him no stranger to potent potables, which is why Danny Nowell’s “John Jeremiah Sullivan” cocktail is so appropriate.
Ta-Nahisi Coates’ bibliography
Earlier this month, Ta-Nahisi Coates published a conversation-changing long form article on race and reparations in The Atlantic (we covered other pundits’ responses here). Now, he is blogging a brief bibliography of the sources he consulted while writing that seminal essay. Parts one and two are available now, with two more installments planned for today and tomorrow. Whether or not you agree with Coates, it’s a fantastic reading list on race relations in America.
Form of the Future
“For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation.” Tor.com on why novellas are the form of the future.
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I haven’t read any of Hocking’s books, so maybe I shouldn’t talk, but it disappoints me that her plots/characters/etc seem solely based off what would make her books more popular or gain more money–or that’s the impression I get from the article, anyway.
I’m glad that digital self-publishing has helped jump-start the careers of writers, but I don’t look forward to having to sift through less-than-desirable reading material in the future.
Shit always floats to the top.