In the world of selling books, it’s not all about the sentences. At Ploughshares, agent Eric Nelson argues: A fresh plot matters and unusual characters do, too. “The most interesting books have characters who do the opposite of what we’d do… Imagine Hamlet, if Hamlet took decisive action. Horror movies wouldn’t exist at all without the idiot who always suggests they split up.”
It’s all about the characters
“History is filled with irony”
Casey N. Cep ponders oppositional forces at work on two statues harkening back to the days of Maryland’s slaveholders. “More than tragedy or romance, history is filled with irony,” she notes.
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Share Your Ebooks
Amazon now lets you "lend" your ebooks to other readers for a period of 14 days. And, in an interesting touch that adds a physical limitation to a digital product, you can't read a book you've lent to someone while they're borrowing it.
DOJ, Sixteen US States Sue Over E-Book Pricing
The Justice Department is suing Apple and five major US publishers for colluding to inflate e-book prices. Following the DOJ's lead, 16 states have filed similar lawsuits.
Brief Encounters
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Sneak Peek at Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Over at Bloom today, a sneak look at an excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, featured this week on the cover of the NY Times Sunday Book Review and out April 7. Writes Philip Caputo, Nguyen "brings a distinct perspective" to the Vietnam War that "reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes."
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Things to Be Cognizant Of
All of us have particular words that we use a little too often. Writers tend to be embarrassed about their predilections for certain turns of phrase. At Slate, Matthew J.X. Malady reacts to the news that he uses iteration too much, and delves into the ways our verbal habits spread to others.
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Life in Letters
“To age is to understand that the powers of total recovery are gone, are no longer anticipated (except by those who, having lost their marbles, no longer know what to anticipate).” The epistolary legacy of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and Elizabeth Bishop offers invaluable insight into the process of growing older, writes Robert Fay for The Atlantic. See also our own Lydia Kiesling on the narrative possibilities of leaked emails.
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