“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
Ask Ayn (Rand)
Recalibrating the Hype Game
Three Guys One Book wonders why publishers aren’t more aggressive about drumming up pre-publication hype, instead admonishing media outlets to hold their coverage until after the books are published.
●
●
“What’s it like to fall in your thirties?”
“I could measure my progress with metrics like number of scabs collected, number of inches ollied,” writes Nick Courage, in his great piece about rediscovering skateboarding in his thirties. “There was an objective truth to the sport; unlike my writing, my powerslides were self-validating.”
●
●
Amazon on Translation
“This year, AmazonCrossing plans to publish ‘77 titles from 15 countries and 12 languages’ in the United States, which will almost certainly dwarf the output of Dalkey and its ilk. And, with this new $10 million commitment, the number of works in translation published by AmazonCrossing should continue to soar. Which means that AmazonCrossing will almost certainly be the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States for at least the next five years.” At The New Republic, find out how Amazon became the largest publisher of translated works. Our own Michael Bourne breaks the news that Amazon has purchased the English language.
●
●
Lux Fiat
“Language is more direct, open, unself-conscious, precise, and human. It doesn’t belong to me anymore but to the atmosphere, and this makes me happy.” Henri Cole on having his poetry projected onto buildings by Jenny Holzer.
●
●
DFW’s postcard to Don DeLillo
In addition to our own annotation of David Foster Wallace‘s work today, Electric Literature‘s blog has a great little piece of literary history up in the form of a postcard he wrote to Don DeLillo.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Chevalier; Makumbi; Segal; Smith-Stevens; Southwood; Bell; Hadley
Out this week: New Boy by Tracy Chevalier; Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi; The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal; The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens; Evensong by Kate Southwood; Behind the Moon by Madison Smartt Bell; and Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.