For years, one of the best ways to make a living as a writer (if you didn’t want to go into academia) was to become an ad copywriter. They heyday of print was flush with opportunities to make bank off billboards and publications. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring looks back on the ad copy of Fay Weldon, who gave the UK, among other things, the slogan “Vodka makes you drunker quicker.” (Related: Hope Mills on working for a creative agency.)
Your Words Here
“Queries are unacceptable”
Recommended Reading: Willy Blackmore talking to Matthew J.X. Malady about the time he tried to be a literary agent.
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“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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Bridget Jones and the Misprint
You’d expect excessive swearing, smoking, and sex in a Bridget Jones novel, but a few copies of Mad About the Boy have accidentally included 40 pages of English actor’s David Jason’s memoir, My Life. Publisher Penguin Random House has admitted to the hilariously postmodern mistake. To find out what’s really in the book, read an excerpt at NPR.
Big Sky
I’ve written before about Literary Enemies, a series at the Ploughshares blog in which two writers are shown to have opposing sensibilities. This week, Lily Meyer argues that Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson are a worthy addition to the series, as the former contracts narrative space and the latter expands it. Sample quote: “It seems to me that Marilynne Robinson’s project, in her books suffused with Protestant belief, has nothing to do with Jesus or with God.”
Kindle’s “Public Notes”
Amazon’s “Public Notes” feature kindle.amazon.com isn’t as new as some are saying, but it might be creepier than you think. In other Kindle news, GalleyCat‘s put together a “how-to” guide to copy and pasting text selections from one device to another.