If Nicholas Wroe’s profile of Javier Marías doesn’t get you excited to read the Spanish novelist’s work, then maybe Hari Kunzru’s Year In Reading entry from this past year will do the trick.
“I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud”
No Wonder They Spend More Time, Then
Are these two statistics linked? According to a Pew Internet Libraries study, 30% of those “who read e-content say they now spend more time reading,” and according to studies cited on CreativePro, people can read printed text read “25% faster than on-screen text.”
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BookExpo America
John Green, Tina Fey, and “a book-swapping/speed-dating cocktail hour”: BookExpo America has taken over Manhattan’s Javitz Center, and if you live anywhere near New York we think you might want to check out the public BookCon event this Saturday. We’re not saying you’ll meet the love of your life, but maybe you’ll win the Hunger Games trivia contest.
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A Method to the Madness
All the world is about to become a stage. The Globe Theatre will be performing Hamlet in every country on Earth starting on April 23, 2014, Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. The 205-nation tour should take two years. This is one of many Shakespearean anniversary celebrations including contemporary authors covering his classics.
Not Enough Thrills
There’s no official protocol for responding to a disappointed fan, but that may change after more writers get wind of this response, written by Threats author Amelia Gray, to a man who complained that her book was “nothing more than conversations among insane people.” Gray admitted that the man’s gripe did, in fact, have merit, after which she urged him to buy a copy of A Time to Kill.
Another “Mildred Pierce”
Are you a Mildred Pierce fan? James M. Cain’s recently discovered manuscript will be released next year by Hard Case Crime.
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RapGenius Breaks Down “The Wasteland”
Nineteen intrepid RapGenius users set out to break down the “cultural clusterf*ck and middle finger to the stripped-down simplicity of the Imagists” otherwise known as T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.”