Writing for Ploughshares, Sean Bishop ranks ten poetry presses by the quality of their cover designs.
Take THAT, eBooks!
Anecdotes On-Screen
Attention all readers who want to talk pretty one day: a story by David Sedaris has just been made into a film.
YA Gay
Two American YA authors, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, were asked to "straighten" gay characters. Here is the rebuttal that followed.
Uncovering Amazon
Book publishers will tell you how many titles they are publishing this fall. Apple at least reveals how many iPads it sells. But Amazon is taking a different tack, shrouding much of the plans for its publishing venture in secrecy.
Curiosities
io9 offers up "The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life," from Frankenstein to Pattern Recognition. (via)Cathleen Schine on the charms of Peter CareyThe "Thomas Bernhard cult" claims a new initiate.F.O.T.M. (Friend of The Millions) Lydia Millet talks about "endangered species, the idea of motherhood, and her stint at Hustler.""Why do scribblers make drinking their second art? For one thing, it primes them for their task." Writers and booze.Some American Studies undergrads at The University of Virginia have put together an online exhibit titled "The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s."NPR's "In Character" segment considers Hawthorne's Hester Prynne.
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Happy (?) Birthday, Franz
Franz Kafka's birthday was a couple of days ago -- the celebration (which would surely have been a subdued affair) would have been his 133rd. Celebrate yourself by taking look at this helpful animation which explains the woefully misused term "Kafkaesque."
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Spitting Straight Fire
"You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought." Solange Knowles wrote an essay and you need to read it. See also: our review of Wild Hundreds.
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