The Chronicles of Narnia ebooks are on sale on Amazon today only for $1.99 a piece.
Lazy Sunday
Don’t Fear the Reaper
"It is a sad irony that the snake’s rattle, which functions as a warning device, is widely regarded as a bellicose drumroll, or war-cry, instead. It may well have been in a mood of remorse for having killed a rattlesnake on impulse that [William] Bartram, vowing solemnly that he 'would never again be accessory to the death of a rattle snake,' painted his marvelous portrait of a coiled rattler." Christopher Benfey on Rattlesnake Island, a sanctuary set up to protect the woodland serpents from their greatest danger -- us.
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Everyone Is a Writer
“People in the publishing industry were complaining that ‘everyone is a writer now.’ I thought, well, why fight that? Isn’t that a good thing?” Andy Hunter, Publisher & COO of Catapult, Publisher of Literary Hub, and Co-Founding Chairman of Electric Literature, talks about the impetus for his three ventures.
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LA Times Lays Off Reviewers
The Los Angeles Times book review laid off its entire staff of freelance book reviewers.
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Wimmer Discusses Forthcoming Bolaño
Scott Esposito interviews Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666 and The Savage Detectives. They discuss some forthcoming additions to the ever expanding Bolaño oeuvre (which will be potential additions to a future edition of our Bolaño syllabus.)
Mania for Classification
Our own Emily St. John Mandel is in conversation with Laura van den Berg over at the FSG blog. “We have such a mania for classification, don’t we? Everything just seems so black-or-white, one-or-zero, genre-or-literary sometimes, and I don’t think those divisions are especially helpful.” The authors are Year in Reading alumni, and you can check out Mandel’s and van den Berg’s posts at the respective links.
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