Sarah Wienman, the news editor for Publisher’s Marketplace, offers some great tips for aspiring literary journalists. Once you’ve looked them over, maybe you’ll even want to pitch The Millions for our #LitBeat Tumblr feature? If so, just send me an email with the details of the event you’d like to cover.
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Our Correspondent
As a poet, historian, critic, translator and editor of The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley was a genuine literary polymath, which is why it’s not surprising that he wrote eloquent letters. In one, for example, he described Larry McMurtry, who Cowley taught when McMurtry was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as a “wild young man from Texas, expert in pornography.” In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews The Long Voyage, a new collection of Cowley’s letters.
The Gray Salt Sea, The Wine-Dark Sea
Writing for Lapham’s Quarterly, Caroline Alexander takes a deep dive into Homer’s “wine-dark sea” to uncover the origins and meaning behind the poet’s “incomprehensible” phrase.
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A Year in Reading from The New Yorker
New Yorker contributors - including a couple of participants in our "Year in Reading" series - offer a predictably thoughtful and heterodox guide to the best books they read this year.
“Best Speech on the Future of Books & Publishing”
Richard Nash's keynote at Booknet Canada: it's not about "getting published" it's about "happiness," which is about "connecting." Chris Anderson of Wired tweeted, "Best speech on the future of books and publishing I've ever seen."
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No-Bull Bourbon Reviews
It’s about an hour away from 5 o’clock over here, so that gives you plenty of time to read Chris Newgent’s “No-Bull Bourbon Review” on Hobart’s website. “A true bourbon,” Newgent writes, “is a bourbon with a story worth remembering.” Agreed. And so would Walker Percy.
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