Ariel Bogle has a good round up over on Moby Lives about Paypal, Amazon, Apple, and censorship in publishing.
Money, not ethics, ultimately motivates censorship
Hemingway Double Shot
Got a couple thousand bucks lying around? You can place a bid on one of Ernest Hemingway’s love letters. Or, for a more modest price of “free,” you can read Tim Weed’s rumination entitled “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Patchett, Stein, Brandon
The big literary new release this week is Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. Also recently out is Gertrude Stein’s long-lost oddity for children, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays. New in paperback is John Brandon’s Citrus County.
No award given
Former Pulitzer Prize juror Laura Miller gives a little insight into how the award works, and posits some possible reasons that the fiction award may have been withheld.
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The Marshmallow Mystery
Would you eat the marshmallow or would you resist temptation? That is the question. Our own Michael Bourne gets to the meat of why the mallow experiment fascinates us at The New York Times Magazine. “The tale of the marshmallows, as presented in Goleman’s book, read like some science-age Calvinist parable. Was I one of the elect, I wondered, a child blessed with the moral fortitude to resist temptation? Or was I doomed from age 4 to a life of impulse-driven gluttony?”
I wonder if Garth speaks Hungarian?
László Krasznahorkai is giving a reading in NYC, and our own Garth Risk Hallberg is acting as host. You might also enjoy this: Paul Morton interviewed Krasznahorkai for The Millions just last month.
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Staying and Staying and Staying
“It’s interesting to me now how many lawyers I’ve published. There’s something about the retelling, the assembling of a logical arc, about planting the clues and so forth that is believable and compelling. There’s a similarity in the way your mind needs to work, too. The logical progression of the narrative, the planting clues, the revelations and also just imbuing it with the emotional truth of the moment. That’s what a fiction writer has to do.” An interview with editor and literary gatekeeper Lee Boudreaux.
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“Does it help writers to drink?”
Writing for The Guardian, Blake Morrison ponders the eternal question: “does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or … advertising executives?”