The publishers Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK have begun a “social media experiment” in which they’ll use PeerIndex to single out “influencers” to review and promote books. “Influencers” will be determined by the breadth and reach of their social media presence, and they’ll be selected based on their relevance to certain books. This kind of marketing is exactly what Eli Pariser warns about in The Filter Bubble. (For a quick summary, listen to his TED talk.)
On “Influencers” and Filters
Why Barry Writes
In the pages of Oxford American, the late Barry Hannah confesses to writing “out of a greed for lives and language.”
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Decolonizing Our Shelves
“… Stop talking about diversity and start decolonizing our shelves.”At the Winter Institute 2018 (Wi13), keynote speaker Junot Diaz lambasted the publishing industry for talking — but doing little else — about diversity in literature, and implored librarians and booksellers to fill their shelves with diverse books. From our archives: an essay on race, gender, and Diaz’s writing.
Donald Barthelme’s Reading List
The Believer posts a 2003 essay featuring Donald Barthelme’s reading list, which came secondhand to Kevin Moffett, a self-professed non-reader: “Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books ‘in no particular order, just read them,’ which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.” (via The Paris Review)
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Margaret Atwood Talks Twitter
“Time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folk songs in which the hero spends a night with the queen of the faeries and then returns to find that 100 years have passed and all his friends are dead…” Margaret Atwood talks Twitter with Robert McCrum.
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Telling a beautiful lie
Chris Jones’s latest feature for Esquire wraps a copyright infringement case up in a meditation on the power of magic, the will to believe and the essence of the delight we can find in art. Warning: may lead you down an endless Penn & Teller YouTube rabbit hole.
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Shortlist Announced for the Tournament of Books
Can’t wait for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books? The staff announced their shortlist and panel of judges this morning. The shortlist includes, among other books, Redeployment by Phil Klay, which took home this year’s National Book Award, as well as our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
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Feeling Fraudulent
“Whenever I tried to invent a character or a situation, I felt a stab of guilt. I could hear my teacher’s quavering voice saying, Write what you know! Why had she insisted on this so vociferously?” Writing class mantras are easy to impart but they are also easily misinterpreted. A.X. Ahmad, author of The Last Taxi Ride and The Caretaker, learns this truth the hard way as he tries to become a writer following a personal upheaval. Pair with Ahmad’s Millions essay on “The Thriller, Reinvented.”
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