Anyone who cares about the financial viability of the book business should read Author’s Guild President Scott Turow’s open letter on the implications of the government’s threatened anti-trust suit against major publishers and Apple over alleged collusion in e-book pricing.
Letter from Scott Turow
Another Veselka Novel on the Way
Zazen author Vanessa Veselka announced on Tuesday that she has sold her second novel. Unfortunately, she doesn’t reveal many more details than that, so we’re all going to have to bide our time until then.
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Strolling Story
Recommended Reading: Lydia Davis’s new short story, “Old Men Around Town,” in the New Statesman. “He stops to tell us that he must be up early in the morning – to get down to the factory. The factory is gone, his men are gone, but he still seems to be in charge of something.” For more Davis, check out her new collection.
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The Book of Exodus
“What we call them is entirely irrelevant: emigrants, migrants, refugees, exiles—we all know to whom we refer. Refugeedom is our common cultural meme. It is the story with which Christian civilization begins. We bear the imprint of the furious index finger God used to banish Adam and Eve from Eden.” Dubravka Ugrešić writes about displacement and the refugee crisis for the Literary Hub. Pair with Arnon Grunberg’s Millions essay on Ugrešić’s legacy.
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The White Knight
Ryan Topper writes for Public Books about Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation and rejects the white savior plot that characterizes many child-soldier narratives. Pair with Noah Deutsch’s Millions review of the novel on which the series was based.
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Patriotic Poetry
Writing for Vouched Books (of which I’ve raved previously), Tyler Gobble dedicates his “Best Thing I’ve Read This Week” column to Laurie Saurborn Young’s Patriot chapbook. The work collects thirteen poems – each entitled “Patriot” – which “craft as they go a sense of living, having lived, the naming as a startling mechanism to remind just how much there is here, right here, hello.”
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Limits
Last month, Austin Bunn published The Brink, his debut collection of short stories. The stories, as Ryan Krull describes them in The Rumpus, hinge on pushing characters to some personal limit of behavior. In an interview, Bunn talks about why that is, as well as his new short film, In the Hollow.
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