Introducing a new literary site: Electric Literature and Grove Atlantic have combined forces to create Literary Hub, a site that will collect bookish news and articles from around the web.
Introducing Literary Hub
Amazon: criticism you can count on
A study of the top 100 non-fiction titles between 2004 and 2007, and the major media and Amazon reviews for each title, yields some fascinating results: “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”
Only a Gentile
Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Quentin Tarantino in The Atlantic and writes about why Inglorious Basterds is a very un-Jewish treatment of rage toward Nazis.
Identifying in the First Person
Jessica Love writes for The American Scholar about some recent psychological studies on the art and perspective of storytelling. Of particular interest is the way “the first person does seem to encourage us to identify with the narrator, especially when that narrator is a lot like us.” Not that identifying with narrators is the primary purpose of reading, as the New Yorker reminds us in a piece against “relatability,” but it’s something to consider the next time you pick up a novel and find a character who seems to be just like you.
Yaffa S. Santos on Going Beyond the Five Senses
Santos discusses her debut novel, A Taste of Sage, and what it took for her to reach the finish line.
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Silvertongued Wilson
Though Mark Twain first gained notoriety after publishing an essay about a famous jumping frog, the onetime Samuel Clemens didn’t really hit his stride until he became a public speaker, as the money he accrued from reading in front of audiences gave him a steady source of income. At Salon, Ben Tarnoff recounts Twain’s journey to the podium, one laid out more broadly in Tarnoff’s book about a group of San Francisco writers.
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Comma Confessional
“One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Mary Norris‘s “Confessions of a Comma Queen,” from the New Yorker.
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