Science now confirms what’s long been suspected by people related to theater kids: “the quality of a performance does not drive the amount of applause an audience gives.”
A(n Induced) Standing Ovation
News Roundup
Like bestseller lists? The Book Standard’s giving them away for free for the next two weeks.Alibris is bought by a private equity firm. PW article suggests Abebooks could be next. (via BookFinder blog)Small publishers book big rewards (via Mumpsimus), but…Bookshops fall prey to online sales.
●
●
The Story Behind the Photo
The Guardian has the interesting story behind the arresting photo of Prince Charles and Camilla being harassed by protesters that appeared on the front page of The New York Times and other newspapers around the world today. (via)
●
●
A Portrait of the Musician as a Young Man
James Joyce inspires a lot of English papers but not songs. Yet musician Casey Black based his song “Happiness” off of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With lyrics like, “So I walk the Dublin streets like they were passageways through my soul,” we think Joyce would approve.
●
●
Praising Penelope
Biographer and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald of the Booker Prized novel Offshore, was born on this day in 1916. Ranked twenty-third on the London Times 2008 list of “Britain’s Fifty Greatest Writers Since WWII,” Fitzgerald didn’t begin her twenty-year writing career until age fifty-eight. Can we say Post-40 Bloomer?
●
●
Times: New Film and Book Claim Five New J.D. Salinger Books to Be Published Starting in 2015
The Times is reporting that a new film and companion book (Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno) “include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.” One of the books is said to include a retooled version of Salinger’s unpublished (but available at the Princeton library) story “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.” Kristopher Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) wrote about the story for us in 2011. Bonus Link: Garth Risk Hallberg on Salinger’s legacy.
●
●
Finding the Red Moon
ICYMI: Brad Listi interviewed Benjamin Percy as part of his Other People Podcast. Among other things, they talked about Percy’s new novel.
●
●
Publish or Perish, But Please Don’t Peer Review
The recent shuttering of the University of Missouri Press raises an important question for all academic publishers: is the cost of peer review to blame?