The New Yorker’s book blog continues to host “Questioningly,” a so-called Twitter game show. The most recent installment featured the imagined Facebook status updates of literary figures, and was hosted by Ben Greenman. Who, might I add, is on a roll these days over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency too.
Ben Greenman is on a roll
FictionDaily
FictionDaily tales a page from Arts and Letters Daily and posts links to pieces of fiction found online in three different categories (long, short, and genre) every day.
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Rachman’s Single
Tom Rachman, author of Millions Hall of Famer The Imperfectionists, has a new short story out as a Kindle Single: "The Bathtub Spy."
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“This annoying world”
We’ve grappled before with the dark world of Kindle self-publishing. We even published a cautionary tale of trying to live off Kindle erotica. In The Guardian, a look at the worst book covers of the Kindlesphere, all of which appear on an excellent Tumblr.
Literature By The Numbers
The New York Times reports that the titles of every British book published in English in the 19th century (1,681,161, to be exact) are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer insight into the Victorian mind.
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The Young Library
One downside to being an internationally acclaimed author is that people care an awful lot about digging into your past. Haruki Murakami has found this out the hard way, as a librarian from Kobe High School (which Murakami attended during his younger years) has made public a list of books checked out by then-budding author. For more “Murakami meets library,” here’s a review of his own The Strange Library.
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Grammar Wars
“Now, I wear the bloody ink of your beloved red, revisionary pens like warpaint across my cheeks.” Ethan Scofield writes an open letter to Grammar Nazis. Strunk and White, Grammar Police, would be appalled.