“Nurturing eventually becomes coddling, and now it’s time to encourage that work to take a bigger stage,” writes Jared Bland in his plea for the Griffin Poetry Prize to combine its two categories – Canadian and English-language – into one, global whole.
Make the Canadians Face Off Against Everybody Else, Too
Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Low Price Kindle
Amazon’s 7″ Kindle Fire tablet will sell for $199 — less than half the cost of Apple’s cheapest iPad. The color, touch-screen tablet will run Google’s Android software and have access to Amazon’s app store, streaming movies and TV shows. Additionally, Amazon’s announced the launch of the $99 Kindle Touch, and has reduced the price of the standard Kindle to $79.
Borders may liquidate
Borders may be on the brink of liquidation. If the deal goes through, you may be able to score some excellent deals.
“The Most Popular Books of All Time”
This week in book-related infographics: Electric Literature breaks down “The Most Popular Books of All Time.”
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Holiday links
Hope everyone’s holiday is going well. I’ll be putting up one or two more “Year in Reading” posts and then The Millions will most likely be dark until the New Year. But first, a couple of links:One of my favorite end of year lists is the bookfinder.com “Top 10 out of print books”: the main list and broken down into categories.Stephen King names his favorite reads of the year, including a forthcoming novel by A.M. Homes. His number one book, which he calls “the best mystery of the decade,” is LBC pick, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.Millions Flashback: Tis the Season
Dick Wimmer is dead! Long live Dick Wimmer!
Any writer who has felt the sting of rejection—that is, all writers—will be inspired by the story of Dick Wimmer, who has died at the age of 74. Over the course of 25 years, a total of 162 agents and publishers rejected Wimmer’s first novel, Irish Wine, before it was finally published by Mercury House in 1989. The New York Times called it a “taut, finely written, exhaustingly exuberant first novel.” The L.A. Times invoked James Joyce in its review. Wimmer, the iron man of the rejection wars, went on to publish two sequels, Boyne’s Lassie and Hagar’s Dream (All three books are now available in a single volume from Soft Skull.) The moral of Wimmer’s story? Never give up.
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Amazon Releases Its Best 100 Books of 2012
Amazon is kicking off the year-end deluge of lists with its 100 best books of 2012.
Harper Lee Will Publish a Sequel to “Mockingbird”
Harper announced today that To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee will publish a sequel to her famous novel this July. The sequel, titled Go Set a Watchman, was originally written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and features that book’s main character Scout as a grown woman. The book is Lee’s second novel, and the first she’s published since the 1950s.