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
Recommended Reading: New Ashbery
Recommended Reading: The American Reader has some new John Ashbery poems. We love "Listening Tour."
Down Goes the Stout
In what was surely one of the most fun experiments of all time, a team of Irish scientists have finally figured out why Guinness stout bubbles fall instead of rise.
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Lucky Writers
Catherine Banner writes on the “privilege and luck it takes to live the writer's life.” Pair with this Millions essay on not quitting the writing life.
Profanity in Book Titles
Out this week is Marcy Roznick's If You Give a Kid a Cookie, Will He Shut the ---- Up?, a parody aimed at adults of the 1985 children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie... What's up with all the profanity in book titles lately?
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Shattering the Short Story
Recommended Reading: Bailey Lewis's short story at Paper Darts "When the South Wind Blows Glass Shatters and Disappears Like Rain." "A young girl’s body hurtles through a stationery store window at top speed."
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Poetry of Brotherhood
Recommended Reading: The Missouri Review's new poem of the week, Kai Carlson-Wee's “Jesse James Days,” which also won its 2013 Editors' Prize. "If I carried your name to the skateparks and railroad temples of rust, would you come to me, brother."
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A Dissociated World
“We live, in short, with local exceptions, in a dissociated world held together by fragile links of utility and self-promotion underpinned by laws of mutual advantage—a materialist ethos and cosmos that cannot but influence cultural representations and, hence, art, including poetry.” On John Donne and the humanity in art.
Not the First Ebenezer
Our own Kevin Hartnett has an interesting theory as to how Charles Dickens came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. At The Boston Globe, he looks at the evidence that Dickens got inspiration from the amateur writings of millworkers in Massachusetts.
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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.