MaddAddam, the third book in Margaret Atwood’s trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood will be out in the U.S. in September. Bonus: the cover of the book’s Australian edition.
New Margaret Atwood Coming in September
Most Are Made There Already
Having trouble selling your latest book? Consider marketing it to India. According to the latest data from Nielsen BookScan, the Indian book market grew in volume by 45% (and in value by 40%) over the first half of 2011.
Cobbling Together
We tend to assume that life stories, in mentally healthy people, are concrete things, assembled from events that are hard to twist or distort. Yet all of us shape our own stories in ways we can’t always see. At The Atlantic, Julie Beck explores the idea that life stories, as we construct them, form integral parts of our personalities.
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More on the Ailing Humanities
Adding to the general hand-wringing over the state of the humanities, Lee Siegel contradicts Leon Wieseltier’s lament that fewer college students are majoring in literature by contending that modern literature courses ruin the joy of reading. “For every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few,” he writes, “there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist’s chair.” (You can also read a similar argument from a humanities professor in The New Republic.)
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Longreads
This January, Penguin Random House, Goodreads, Mashable and the National Book Foundation are sponsoring National Readathon Day, a holiday which encourages Americans to join together for a marathon reading session. If you’d like to take part, you can start a fundraiser to help support reading education, or else enlist your friends and family to read with you on January 24th from noon to 4 p.m.
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Smuggling Ulysses
Ulysses: The one book that publishers (and Joyce himself) desperately wanted to be confiscated – all in an effort to confront censorship, of course. Mental Floss has the full story.
Something Borrowed, Something Stolen
Is Kenneth Goldsmith continuing to lead the charge in a revolutionary poetry movement? Has he overstepped his bounds? Is conceptual poetry dead? Alec Wilkinson for The New Yorker and Cathy Park Hong for The New Republic offer their opinions.
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OYC to Print
Selections from Open Yale Courses are headed to print. As program director John Donatich explains, “At first glance, you might look at it skeptically and ask why would anybody pay for something that you can get for free. But on second glance you realize that it’s actually not the same thing at all.”
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