The Kilroys, a group of leaders in American theater, has put together a list of 46 plays by emerging women playwrights that they think deserve to produced (only 10.5% of Broadway plays are written by women). That list is a brilliant resource to promote diversity in dramatic literature–but now we want to read all the unpublished plays on it.
46 Women’s Plays
Poet Rocker
Paul Muldoon's band, The Wayside Shrines, is the latest project for Paul Kolderie, the Brooklyn-based producer for Radiohead and Pixies. (via)
“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
Have you ever wanted to take a road trip like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise? You can now. Gregor Weichbrodt used Google Maps to write directions for On The Road's famous 7,527-mile drive. Choose your companions wisely, so you don't get stuck with dysentery in Mexico.
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Economics of the E-Book
The Wall Street Journal reports how literary authors are feeling the pinch in the age of e-books: “The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.”
Tell Us Something We Don’t Know
Interested in writing a bestseller? You may want to check out Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers' newest book, The Bestseller Code. Or maybe not: "At times, it seems like Archer and Jockers are trying to retrofit a closed system. They found that best-sellers have lots of contractions—the better, they explain, to mimic contemporary speech—and exclamation points only rarely ... They conclude that best-sellers consist of 'shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words,' and that best-selling characters 'make things happen.' Active verbs predict best-sellers better than passive verbs. 'Hesitation doesn’t keep pages turning,' Archer and Jockers decide. After all that work, in other words, the algorithm ends up confirming the uncontested tenets of craft and style."
Tuesday New Release Day: Ford; Satyal; Ko; Ferris; Paul; Koul; Ibrahim; Menkedick; Achebe
Out this week: Between Them by Richard Ford; No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal; The Leavers by Lisa Ko; The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris; My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul; One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul; Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim; Homing Instincts by Sarah Menkedick; and a new edition of Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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