Recommended listening: Our own Nick Ripatrazone talks with NHPR about his Millions essay, “55 Thoughts for English Teachers.”
“55 Thoughts” On The Air
First Printings Get Smaller
PW points out yet another publishing industry totem being torn down by the rise of e-books, the first printing number, once a signifier of how “big” publishers and the media expected a book to be: “In an era when first printings are down because e-books can account for as much as 50% of sales on frontlist titles, the term ‘first printing’ sounds more and more out of place.”
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The Fall of “Man”
In The Age of The Crisis of Man, a new book by n + 1 co-founder and editor Mark Greif, the author examines the life and death of the concept of “man,” aka a unified humankind that could be said to suffer from particular conflicts. It was born in the thirties, with the rise of Fascism, but persisted for decades, eventually giving way to a more diversified view of humanity. In Tablet, Adam Kirsch dives into Greif’s arguments.
Peter Carey Point-Counterpoint
Contrasting takes on Peter Carey‘s Parrot & Olivier in America, from Open Letters Monthly and…er, The Onion.
Elliott Holt Talks Anton Chekhov
“On the surface ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story,” writes Elliott Holt in a blog post for The Missouri Review. “[It’s] a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.”
Should We Even Publish This?
Following a recent essay on the value of ambivalence, our own Mark O’Connell explores the nature of confidence in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, he writes that this year’s Web Summit convinced him that tech moguls are congenitally more confident than writers.
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The 2013 Bad Sex Awards
It’s not Christmas, but it’s close. It’s time for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award Shortlist to be released. This year’s finalists include My Education author Susan Choi and famous folk singer Woody Guthrie among others, and the winner(?) will be announced on December 3rd. (Bonus: Their Twitter account is sharing particularly awful excerpts as well.)
Thanks But No
Rejection is something all writers face and no one’s pretending it’s pleasant, but worse than the rejection itself are the hours spent deciphering where a submission went wrong. Thankfully Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature was inspired by a 1920s rejection slip to create a self-explanatory “thanks but no thanks” note. While we’re thankful these aren’t the norm, we can definitely see the appeal…
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What your next-beach-umbrella neighbor is reading
Yes, but what’s everyone else reading this summer? Bookstores in beach towns know better than to stock “business, personal finance, or diet” books–though poetry does pretty well–but they are looking forward to these bestsellers. The print-disinclined can take heart that there are even a fair number of literary movies coming out soon. (Related: our own recommended summer reading list, also blessedly personal finance-free.)
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