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.
Love the beat.
But all he eats is candy.
The history behind the iconic Esquire cover that depicts Andy Warhol trapped in a swirling vortex of tomato soup. Before photoshop! I have a reproduction of this particular cover hanging in my kitchen, and I have to tell you that I can’t bear to eat canned Tomato soup at all anymore.
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Haruki Murakami: Literary Ambassador
Among Haruki Murakami’s many significant literary achievements is the fact that the author has – since the 1990s – become “responsible for triggering and fueling the Japanese literature boom in South Korea.” Indeed, by “creat[ing] bonds of shared emotions and literary sensibilities among tens of millions of people with different cultural and historical backgrounds,” writes Yoon Sang-In, “Murakami’s literary works have emerged as a great cultural asset that contributes to stability in [the East Asian] region.” (Bonus: Murakami’s latest book – which will be published in the States in 2014 – is flying off the shelves in Japan.)
February 18 Is Officially Toni Morrison Day
The state of Ohio passed legislation to honor Lorain-native Morrison, designating her birthday "Toni Morrison Day."
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Sail Away on Shel Silverstein’s Houseboat
If you're the seafaring type, Shel Silverstein's rustic house boat is currently on the market, the perfect spot to write your celebrated collection of children's poetry.
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First Sentence
“I cannot help feeling, on being invited to contextualize my own fiction, that the least qualified person possible has been asked. It is more still: hesitance, dread, that as a blind man in a failing aircraft I have been offered the yoke. I imagine it is the same for other writers, for the very fact that you write a story, and not a critical essay, suggests that near everything you hope to say lies outside the bounds of explicit statement.” Despite all that, here’s an essay by Greg Jackson at Granta in which he attempts to contextualize his own fiction.
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Ahh Memories
Book Riot offers a step-by-step guide to making your own book covers out of paper bags. Not saying this was a thing we did as kids, particularly when jacket design didn’t meet expectations – a certain Dover edition of the Francis Hodgson Burnett classic A Little Princess comes to mind – but not not saying that either.
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“A blood-sworn fan”
“So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it’s more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me.” Talking with Karen Russell.