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
Perils of the Humanities Students
In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain’s abundance of “students choosing to read humanities at university.” As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, “we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts.”
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The Curious History of a Curious Account
Our own Michael Bourne takes a look at Thomas King’s Inconvenient Indian, which struggled to find a publisher in the United States despite flying off the shelves in Canada. “The curious publication history of [the book],” Bourne writes, “serves as a window into the wide differences in the way mainstream Americans and Canadians view the Native peoples in their midst.”
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Highlighting the Handmaid
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” BookRiot did us all a service by finding out the 10 most highlighted passages of (the e-book edition of) Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale. You must also read our own Edan Lepucki on reading and re-reading Atwood.
And in This Corner, Weighing in at 900 Pages…
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito alerts us to a forthcoming 900-page collection of short stories by Stephen Dixon. One hopes Fantagraphics has beefed up its copy-editing department since its last fictional behemoth, Alexander Theroux‘s Laura Warholic.
Tuesday New Release Day: Franzen, Binet, Baldwin, Müller
A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin’s memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel.