After losing funding last spring, the Orange Prize has experienced a rebirth, gaining new financial backers and changing names; it will now be known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Close Call
Zen and the Art of Headlines
This handy guide from The Week shows how to identify which website a headline comes from, from Gawker to The New York Times. Pair with Janet Potter’s Millions piece on rewriting book titles to get more clicks.
●
●
The Best Books in Translation
Open Letter Books director Chad Post teamed up with Green Apple Books buyer Stephen Sparks to make a list of their twenty favorite books in translation. Among their selections is László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which Adam Levy reviewed for us last year, and which Post and Sparks describe as “a diabolical, haunting deconstruction of apocalyptic messianism.”
●
●
Around the Horn
I’ve been noticing some of the fantastic pages that libraries and museums have put up for their book exhibits. Here’s Czech book covers of the 1920s and 1930s and Civil War maps from the Library of Congress, for example.Fans of audiobooks will enjoy this essay by the pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Link via OPTR.Thinking about getting rid of some books? This Ask Metafilter thread has lots of suggestions on where to donate your books.For a year, I was a bookstore employee who blogged, so the story of this book clerk in the UK who got fired for blogging hit pretty close to home.
●
●
Haruki Murakami on Memory Versus Reality
Memory is at the forefront as Haruki Murakami discusses his new story, "With the Beatles," with Deborah Treisman.
●
●
●
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)
●
●
Summer Poems from Charles Simic
Recommended Listening: Charles Simic reads five new poems for The Southern Review’s summer podcast.
●
●
What Charlie Kaufman Has to Offer
In 2011, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gave a 70-minute lecture at the BFI in London. Little did he know Eliot Rausch would take snippets from that lecture, set them to accompanying, complementary visual clips, and turn the entire thing into a marvelous, beautiful video entitled What I Have to Offer.
●
●