Recommended Listening: Andrew Solomon’s Moth story, “My Post-Nuclear Family.” (Solomon’s work has previously been shouted out in our Year in Reading series by Millions staffers Hannah Gersen and Edan Lepucki.)
“I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay.”
The Great Indie Bookstore Tour
In 2013, poet and bookseller Alan Brandsted approached Seattle’s Wave Books with an interesting proposal: in exchange for a box of galleys and gas money, he would embark on a cross-country mission to “spread the good word of poetry to independent bookstores.” What followed is the ongoing Indie Bookstore Tour, which is being chronicled on Tumblr (hashtag “#wavepoetrytour”) and Instagram. (First Tumblr post can be found here.)
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“Better yet, Carpe Wallpaper.”
Jessica Probus’ send-up of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is brilliant. I present The YOLO Wallpaper.
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Carol Hughes to Write Memoir
Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol Hughes, intends to write a memoir about her marriage to the former poet laureate.
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Miscellany
Bat Segundo’s BEA podcasts continue. Yours truly makes a brief appearance in the latest installment.Elizabeth Crane is discussing George Saunders’ collection In Persuasion Nation at her blog this week.Meant to post this Friday, but luckily I think spelling bee-related links have an indefinite shelf life. Language Hat and his band of commenters provide indispensible commentary on the word that won the National Spelling Bee, “ursprache,” and other Bee topics.
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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.”
Analyzing the Scumbag Brain
Jessica Love explores a little of the science behind every weary reader’s nemesis: zoning out.
“It’s not very Knopf”
Remember a few weeks ago when Paul Bogaards was kind enough to list us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100? We were entry no. 67, not nearly so powerful in the book publishing world as the original publisher of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, Amy Einhorn; her hair was entry no. 4. Though we were deemed slightly better than New Jersey, which was listed at no. 68. We even posted a curiosity about it. Well, the New York Observer’s got a follow up piece on the joke, and is calling the original Tumblr post a flame out. Bogaards takes a different tack, saying that his Twitter and Tumblr streams are “a curation of industry anxiety. Interspersed with humor. And cocktails.”
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