Do you want a book with your Happy Meal? McDonald’s will replace Happy Meal toys with books for two weeks next month. Don’t expect to pull out Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs with your fries, though. The books were created for McDonald’s by Leo Burnett and discuss nutrition. Did they miss the irony?
The Happiest Meal
Profit-Sharing for Authors and Publishers
Novelist and blogger M.J. Rose thinks authors’ personal marketing efforts should be more substantially rewarded; Robert Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio, responds with a proposal to restructure the author-publisher relationship into 50-50 profit-sharing, as HarperStudio has done.
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Previewing Batuman
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, the forthcoming debut effort by sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman, gets an intriguing write-up in Publishers Weekly.
Owning It
“What I want to argue is that we in contemporary English and literature departments need to think instead about how to keep doing abstraction, but better—how can we ‘own’ it, as my students might say, rather than wish it away.” Jeanne-Marie Jackson writes at 3:AM Magazine about comparative literature, the public, and politics.
Big Names, New eBooks
A pair of big-name writers have new shorter-form ebook originals out. Stephen King’s Guns is a “pulls-no-punches essay” about gun violence in America, with all proceeds going to Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Meanwhile, Richard Russo has a new novella, Nate in Venice.
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The World’s Most Literary Rent Party
A literary event with an extremely star-studded guest list will be held next month for a good cause. The World’s Most Literary Rent Party Ever will raise money for author Charles Bock’s wife, who is receiving treatment for leukemia, and will include Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mary Gaitskill, Joshua Ferris, Rivka Galchen, Amy Hempel, Nicole Krauss, Rick Moody, Richard Price, George Saunders, and quite a few others.
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“In the future, you’ll be so lightheaded”
Recommended Reading: this collection of short pieces by Rumpus readers on the subject of magic.
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