Goodreads has unveiled its new book recommendation feature. Unlike Amazon’s feature, Goodreads’ will draw data from every book you’ve read and logged, not just those you’ve purchased online.
Goodreads Recommendations
Crowd-source Everything
In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree “in aggregate about the quality of a book,” non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be “more eclectic,” “more supportive of debut authors,” and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.
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Tumblr Books: A Call for Submissions
Calling all Tumblr-ers! Chronicle Books, the company responsible for such web-to-paper successes as F*ck I’m In My Twenties! and Dads Are the Original Hipsters, is looking for “the next big humor book idea.” Details for submissions can be found on their introductory Tumblr post. The deadline is February 28th.
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To Essay
“For a while, shortly after I finished an undergraduate creative writing course, everything I wrote started with an observation or a realization…I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.” At The Morning News, Martin Connelly writes about how he lost his drive to become an essayist and the surprising thing that makes him want to start again — his daughter. For more on the power of the essay, read our interview with Leslie Jamison.
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Carrying on García Márquez’s Torch
After the passing of Gabriel García Márquez, the team of Reed Johnson, Juan Forero, and Sara Munoz had cause to opine within the pages of the Wall Street Journal, who are the other “post-boom Spanish-language fiction writers whose works continue to redraw the map of Latin literature?” They list six suggestions, but I think one of the names on that list would’ve disagreed with the comparison. (Bonus: An unpublished Márquez manuscript may be on the way as well.)
Wood and Krasznahorkai in Conversation
The latest installment of Housing Works Bookstore Café’s biweekly podcast features a conversation between James Wood and László Krasznahorkai. (We interviewed him for our site last year, too.) The Hungarian author’s next book, Seiobo There Below, was highlighted in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
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Going Clear
“While guys spent time in these Seg cells calling out chess moves over the walkways or doing push-ups until their veins bulged from their temples, I was in my cell pecking away trying to create a different world for myself. Some kind of way I felt I could rewrite my future.” For The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, Daniel A. Gross tells the story of the Swintec Corporation, the nation’s sole supplier of clear typewriters, whose largest market is prisons. Pair with our own Bill Morris on using his Royal to write.
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Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winners Announced
For the past 17 years, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award has celebrated “six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.” This year’s winners are Melanie Diane (poetry), Apricot Irving (nonfiction), Fowzia Karimi (fiction), Namwali Serpell (fiction), Merritt Tierce (fiction), and JoAnn Wypijewski (nonfiction). They will accept their awards on September 22 in New York City.
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“Pardon me, where can I purchase a camel?”
It’s easy to forget that traders and travelers a millennium ago were as tongue-tied in foreign countries as college backpackers are today. How convenient for Silk Road travels, then, to have had a phrasebook translating between languages like Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mandarin Chinese.
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