Etgar Keret is a rising (if not risen already) literary star, but these days, following the publication of his new collection Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, “he seems to be growing complacent, bored even, with his talent,” writes Joshua Furst.
Resting On One’s Imaginative Laurels
Reasons to Remember Her Name
At Slate, William Brennan looks at the oeuvre of Shirley Jackson, whose posthumous 1968 collection, Come Along With Me, got reissued recently by Penguin.
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The Collector of Baskervilles
If there’s anyone more obsessive than Sherlock Holmes, it’s Glen Miranker. The former Apple executive owns the largest private collection of Sherlock Holmes works, totaling 4,500 items including books, manuscripts, illustrations, and other oddities. How he amassed such a collection isn’t a mystery — he’s been at it since the 1970s.
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First Printings Get Smaller
PW points out yet another publishing industry totem being torn down by the rise of e-books, the first printing number, once a signifier of how “big” publishers and the media expected a book to be: “In an era when first printings are down because e-books can account for as much as 50% of sales on frontlist titles, the term ‘first printing’ sounds more and more out of place.”
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Atwood and Yeats Together
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The Year of Only Publishing Women
“When author Kamila Shamsie challenged the book industry to publish only women in 2018 to help address a gender imbalance in literature, just one publisher took up the challenge.” And Other Stories, an English publisher who publish translations and English language books, has decided to only publish women writers in 2018, according to the BBC. Pair with: an essay by our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee about the visibility and privacy of women writers.
Keep Hope Alive
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
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