The reach of literary Brooklyn grows ever larger, as local hub BookCourt mounts a $300,000 campaign to convert the “Bibliobarn,” 160 miles north in the Catskills, into a “bookshop, event space, and writers’ retreat.” Upstaters, lock up your house-cured salume and artisinally sharpened pencils!
Brooklyn is Coming to Eat Your Children
Some Links
Google put up a special Shakespeare page for easy access to all of his plays through Google Book Search. The Book Search blog has additional details.Latest literary trend story: senators writing books. "About 30 of the 100 currently serving U.S. senators have authored books at some point in their careers, and the number is growing."A literary trend story continues: Product placement in novels. Earlier instances include efforts from Ford and BMW.In the Guardian, "An American judge intervening in a long-simmering feud has ruled that the rights to John Steinbeck's most famous novels... should be seized from his publisher and handed to his descendants."And finally, there's Ed's Twenty-One More Reasons Why Litbloggers Are Evil & Unethical
Digital (and Australian?) Shakespeare
Now that the Folger Shakespeare Library is working to digitize the complete works of the bard, it's worth asking the question, just what did that dude sound like?
The FTC and Foggy Disclosure Rules
Ed Champion interviews the FTC's Richard Cleland in an effort to bring some clarity to the new FTC disclosure rules targeting "bloggers." If this interview is any indication, the rules are imprecise and based on a false distinction, at best. For what it's worth, I'll happily disclose that we do get sent books for review from publishers, and the ways The Millions makes money are outlined on our (new and improved) Support page.
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A Bar Bet, Settled
Our friends at More Intelligent Life tot up the most common titles found on New York's street-corner book stalls.
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Fatal
As titles go, it’s hard to get more straightforward than England and Other Stories, the new collection by Graham Swift. In the Times, Michiko Kakutani provides her verdict, lauding Swift for his ability to paint “vistas as panoramic as those in the stories of Alice Munro.”
“History is filled with irony”
Casey N. Cep ponders oppositional forces at work on two statues harkening back to the days of Maryland’s slaveholders. “More than tragedy or romance, history is filled with irony,” she notes.
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The 2016 BTBA Longlist
The longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award came out. Fiction finalists include Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson’s translation of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (reviewed here by Magdalena Edwards), Ann Goldstein’s translation of Elena Ferrante's The Story of the Lost Child, Lisa Dillman’s translation of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (discussed here in our Book Report), and Christina MacSweeney's translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (reviewed here by Lily Meyer). Poetry finalists include Jason Weiss’s translation of Silvina Ocampo and Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation of Yi Lu.
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Of Rainfall and Fluffy Bathrobes
You've probably heard the internet adage, "If it exists, there is a porn of it." Never has that been truer than in the case of the political erotica of 2016. From a particularly colorful Cruz/Rubio series: “'Who is this Hillary you’ve been texting?' Rubio asks Cruz. 'Saying things like ‘meet me when Marco’s not home,’ ‘I can hook you up,’ ‘what’s the price’ … don’t act all naïve right now!'"