Nollywood is the name given to Nigeria’s $500 million movie business. For about the same amount of money that was spent on the promotion and production of James Cameron’s Avatar, Nollywood is able to churn out a thousand films each year, trailing only Bollywood and Hollywood in terms of revenue.
Doing More With Less
Facebook’s Most Popular Titles
We’ve mentioned the “What books have stayed with you?” social media trend before, and now Facebook has tallied up the most popular titles by country. The results are both exactly what you would expect – The Little Prince ranks high in France, One Hundred Years of Solitude fairs well in Latin America – and a little surprising as the Harry Potter series tops the list in countries ranging from India to Italy to Brazil.
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Read Me an E-Book
Can kids’ books on a tablet beat the real thing? A father of two takes a reading test.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rayner; Yuichi; Jangfeldt
Out this week: Another Night, Another Day by Sarah Rayner; Ground Zero, Nagasaki by Seirai Yuichi and Mayakovsky: A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt. For more on these and other great titles from this year, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Tuesday New Release Day
The latest effort from superstar translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is now on shelves. P & V’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is in our Hall of Fame, and we interviewed the couple last year. Also out: Mark Twain’s long-embargoed Autobiography is now shipping; V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa; X’ed Out by graphic novel master Charles Burns; Avi Steinburg’s literary memoir Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian; and the odd literary project that is James Franco has a new collection out, Palo Alto
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Winter Reads: The Little House Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books bring an icy take on America in winter. To Guardian reader Alison Gibbsme, “as a child, they were full of adventure and excitement; as an adult I am shocked at how full of danger they are.”
What Should Fiction Do?
Bonnie Nadzam asks us what should fiction do? “An artistic practice that perpetually reinforces my sense of self is not, in my mind, an artistic practice.”
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