“Every writer needs an editor, and anyone who says he doesn’t has a fool for a muse.” The New York Times interviews journalists on the importance of editors, and it’s well worth the short read. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s conversation with her editor.
“Every writer needs an editor”
Sunday Reading
Booksellers from NYC’s famous indie bookstore McNally Jackson share 5 book recommendations with Harper’s Bazaar. Elsewhere, The Daily Beast has collected the best long reads of the past week.
A Jump in Stature
Mark Twain first rose to fame as the author of an essay about a frog-jumping contest in California. Originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” the essay went viral in America’s biggest newspapers, eventually inspiring the New York Tribune to write of Twain that “no reputation was ever so rapidly won.” Yet the humor which made the essay so popular is often lost on modern audiences, in no small part because, as Ben Turnoff writes in Lapham’s Quarterly, frontier humor isn’t funny if there’s no Wild West.
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Google to launch e-reader
Google will launch the iriver Story HD this weekend. It will be the first e-reader built to be fully integrated with Google Books.
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Bill Morris at the Half King
Live in NYC? Want to hear our own Bill Morris read from his latest novel? Then stop by the Half King this Monday at 7 p.m. Bill won’t just be reading — he’ll also be spinning songs by James Brown, Smokey Robinson and more.
Mad Money
Modern day celebrities aren’t the only victims of Photoshop. Paula Byrne, a Jane Austen biographer, believes that Austen has been “airbrushed” on her £10 Bank of England note. The portrait makes her look like “a pretty doll with big doe eyes” and diminishes her reputation as an author, Byrne argues.
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Quick Notes
The Washington Post discusses the literary pedigree of the town where I was born, went to college, and got married.A good review of Jonathan Lethem’s new collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist in the New York Observer.Got a nice note from Ulrich Baer, editor and translator of a new book put out by the Modern Library called The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke. Sound interesting. Have a look.Why we blog.
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