Hobart (who just joined Twitter) is running a new contest dubbed The Buffalo Prize. Enter for a shot at $500, or if you’re feeling saucy, for the bonus $100 prize awarded to the “best cover letter ridiculing or praising contests.” They’re also calling for interns to join their team, too.
The Buffalo Prize
Northrop Frye… “a prodigy whose promise was entirely fulfilled.”
The latest issue of the University of Toronto Magazine has an informative, if slightly hagiographical, tribute to the literary critic Northrop Frye. This year marks a century since his birth.
●
●
Arrested Development Meets Academia
“Dr. Kristin M. Barton is seeking proposals for an edited volume … which will explore Arrested Development from a scholarly perspective,” reads a call for submissions on H-Net. I can see the titles of these essays now. Can’t you? “Desperation Economics: There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand” or “I Don’t Know What I Was Expecting: An Exploration of Dead Doves and Tragicomedy.”
●
●
Twitter and its Relationship to Language
A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge is using Twitter to help research the rapidly disappearing Welsh language “[because] tweets don’t follow the conventions of written language” and instead “provide an authentic snapshot of spoken language.” (Bonus: Twitter’s stunning visualizations of “tweet geography.”)
●
●
Whodunnit
And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”
●
●
Jim Crace Takes Home the IMPAC Award
Three cheers for Jim Crace, who just took home the 20th annual IMPAC Dublin Literary Award! If you remember our coverage of the shortlist, you’ll know that the Harvest author beat out TransAtlantic author Colum McCann and Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others.
●
●
All Toured Out
There are book tours and then there are book tours. You either get the full-scale, all-expenses-paid treatment from your publisher, or else you get a request to plan it all and pay for it all yourself. In the weeks after his latest novel came out, our own Bill Morris set off on a DIY tour — all driving, no flying — about which he’s been writing dispatches for The Daily Beast. This week, he thinks about the changing nature of book promotion, recounts his nights in dumpy motels and compares his experience to that of our own Edan Lepucki. (FYI, they talked about writing their novels in a Millions piece.)
●
●