From the annals of Wikipedia: would you rather have Witzelsucht or Foerster’s syndrome? Whichever you decide, it looks like neuron your own with this one.
Keep An Open Mind About It
On (Not) Being a Mother
“The lie I told most often in my twenties during the Reagan era was that I liked other people’s children although I didn’t intend to have my own.” For The Rumpus, Kyoko Mori writes an essay on the choice to raise animals instead of children. Pair with: an essay on the complexities of motherhood.
More Amazon Sales Ranking Crack
Authors now have more Amazon sales ranking data to obsess over. Weekly Nielsen BookScan data is now available to authors for free through their “Author Central” area. (press release)
The Barbarian Nurseries to be a Film?
Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries is being developed into a movie, reports Edward Douglas for ComingSoon. (You can read an excerpt of the book over here.) Elsewhere, you can read Tobar’s take on how “the writer is a revered figure in France.”
Like This Passage?
Ad-driven e-books may be something we’ll all have to deal with in the future. At the Melville House blog, Dustin Kurtz explains why ads that pop up while a person is reading might well be an inevitable development. (If you’re like me, your reaction to this is simple: ugh.)
The Great Terry Castle
“Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle — incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.