Is there an indie press that consistently punches up as high and as successfully as Two Dollar Radio? They’re the ones who unleashed The Orange Eats Creeps onto our shelves three years ago, and they followed it up shortly thereafter with the breakout work of Scott McClanahan. Now? Now they’re poised for a threepeat with Shane Jones’s Crystal Eaters, which has already earned its author interviews on Hobart and The Paris Review. (Bonus: TDR’s publisher on moving his outfit to Ohio.)
Next In Line from Two Dollar Radio
Do Books Make Friendships?
Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? Facebook reveals that music and film make friendships; books, not so much.
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Shakespeare’s NYC
Coming soon: short films for each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, all set in New York City.
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Airport Casualties
“I would venture to assume that all Muslim Americans felt the weight of this paradox in the years after September 11th, and never more so than when at the airport.” On the post-9/11 world, over at The Rumpus.
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El Presidente
Following the death of Hugo Chavez, the publishing industry is gearing up to provide retrospectives of his life. At the Christian Science Monitor, Whitney Eulich reviews Comandante, a book that claims Chavez was “this close” to becoming a dictator.
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Censorship in China
“We have documented cases of at least 47 writers and journalists currently imprisoned in China. The average sentence for a writer is eight years in prison, and some sentences are even harsher.” PEN American Writers send a letter to Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, in response to his visit to the U.S. We have a few pieces about censorship to pair with it.
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A Sign of the Apocalypse?
The singularity is near: If you go to your Amazon recommendations page, you'll see that you can now log into Facebook from there "to get Amazon recommendations for you and discover your friends' Favorites and Likes."
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Mini Anthology, Major Writers
Ninth Letter recently launched "Only Silence Will Never Betray You," a mini-anthology of contemporary Bulgarian writers. Editor-at-Large Philip Graham introduces the five writers: Ivayla Alexandrova, Bistra Andreeva, Nikolai Grozni, Georgi Gospodinov, and Marin Bodakov. From our archives: our 2013 interview with Grozni.