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 Releases Fourteen Pilots
Amazon, which recently entered the world of original broadcast content, has subverted television’s traditional “pilot season” by forgoing a staggered release schedule in favor of plunking all fourteen of its pilots onto its website at once. The idea is for audiences to watch the eight comedies and six animated shows for free, and then help the company decide which options are the most promising for long term development. Just a tip: Alpha House features appearances from John Goodman and Bill Murray.
●
●
Can We Try Something Different
“[C]an we finally be bold and listen to the artists and the outsiders and the radicals and the freaks and the avant-garde and the base and the youth and the anarchists and all those who don’t want to do business as usual with the limousine liberalism of both the elite Democrats and Republicans? Can we listen to the dreamers instead of the doubters?” Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has some big, important questions in The Los Angeles Times.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Messud, Ausubel, Hill, Sjón, Powers
New this week: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel, NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, and three newly translated books from by Icelandic author Sjón: The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, and From the Mouth of the Whale. New in paperback is The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.
●
●
Night Shade Books Gets Shady
A publishing flap in three parts, with colons. 1: Publisher’s Weekly details unsettling allegations about Night Shade Books — an unwillingness to answer calls from writers or their agents, stolen digital rights, and missing royalty statements. 2: Night Shade issues an apology. 3: A wronged writer responds.
●
●
Zbigniew Herbert on Leonardo da Vinci
With the publication of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 this week, the New York Review of Books Blog posts his essay on Leonardo da Vinci.