Two American YA authors, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, were asked to “straighten” gay characters. Here is the rebuttal that followed.
YA Gay
Place to Place
“Now the lattice that connects us is digitally immediate we travel all the more, but we’ve lost this thrill of adventure. It’s oddly touching to read a novel where journeys are so inherently exciting, and it makes the book both consummately funny and poignantly elegiac.” On the novel Changing Places by David Lodge.
For Tom Waits, Drink Everything
Do you like listening to music, but often struggle with an appropriate drink order? Enter Drinkify, a website which suggests cocktails based on the tunes you’re playing. (I tested it out with The Wu-Tang Clan. It told me to drink “1 bottle of gin.” Do with this information what you must.)
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The Small Press and the Big Prize
McPherson & Co. typically does print runs of just 2,000 books. With the tiny press about to put out Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-nominated Lord of Misrule, Barnes & Noble alone wants 2,000, and the question is how many to print.
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Shop Talk
There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.
Scholarly Pinterest
Are you on Pinterest? If so, you may be interested in Alice Northover’s round-up of university presses and university libraries that use the site.