Sesame Street turned in a literary puppet parody in their Sons of Anarchy send-up: Sons of Poetry.
“You Need a Rhyming Word? That’s What We Heard!”
The Harper Perennial Model
Harper Perennial is pairing the expansive resources of a major publishing house with the exciting risks of an indie press. Could this magical formula catch on at other houses?
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Just Another Mason
In general, we think of translators as people whose job, briefly summarized, is to create elegant texts out of works in foreign languages. But J.R.R. Tolkien, in his translation of Beowulf, set out to do something different. The Lord of the Rings author published a translation that he kept intentionally clunky. Why? In his telling, he did it to better imitate Old English.
Harlequin History
“How did a humble Canadian publisher—which got its start reprinting other companys’ books—become the name most associated with romance? It’s a long story, involving a peripatetic former fur trader and his opinionated socialite wife, a Procter-and-Gamble-trained Harvard MBA, some jilted Americans and a whole crowd of damned scribbling women.” From Pictorial comes the story of “How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance.”
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A New Adaptation of 1984
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: a new version of 1984 is in the works, with Paul Greengrass signed on to direct and a screenplay by James Graham.
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You Will Survive
“You can only advocate for yourself when you know what it is you want from the experience. You’d be surprised by how many people go into this process and are unclear about what they hope to get out of it.” Over at the Amazon Author Insights blog, Katrin Schumann offers a checklist of seven tips to survive submitting your writing to editors, including this note about articulating your goals beforehand. (Ed. note: Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!)
A Detestable Dichotomy
Paulo Coelho recently condemned Ulysses for being all style and no content. In response, Ali Smith makes the case for style.
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