Just in time for AWP, The New York Times has published a look at “Why Writers Love to Hate the MFA.” We’ve published several other perspectives on the degree over the years, like this, this, this and this.
Love to Hate
Seeking an End to eBook DRM
Joe Wikert explains why the book industry needs to learn from the music industry, drop DRM, and adopt a unified ebook format.
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eBooks Will Surpass Print Sales, But At What Cost?
“PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) estimates that trade … ebooks will drive $8.2 billion in sales by 2017 — surpassing projected print book sales,” writes Laura Hazard Owen. Meanwhile I can’t help but wonder: is this bad news for the environment?
America Central
Newsweek Senior Writer (and Millions contributor) Alexander Nazaryan has a new interview with William T. Vollmann up on Newsweek’s website. To start things off right, he reports that if Vollman were to win the Nobel Prize, he'd enjoy giving a decent chunk of the prize money to prostitutes.
Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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Everybody Kafkas
It’s hard work writing Kafka stories appropriate for children, but a guy named Matthue Roth is willing to do it.
Certainly Got My Attention
Good Books is an online book retailer that donates all of its proceeds to Oxfam. It's also a big fan of trippy literary homage. In a collaboration with two creative studios, and without consulting the Hunter S. Thompson or Franz Kafka estates, the group's released a promo that draws on some of the most "out-there" elements of both writers.
True Originals
A while ago, our own Kaulie Lewis alerted readers to The Turnip Princess, a new collection of previously untranslated Bavarian fairy tales. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Marina Warner reads a new edition of the original stories of the Brothers Grimm, comparing them to the most well-known stories in the fairy tale canon (as well as the stories in The Turnip Princess).
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Appearing Elsewhere
I wrote an essay for The Dublin Review on the strange phenomenon of Internet unboxing videos, in which people remove new purchases from their packaging and talk us through the process in exhaustive detail. You can read the whole thing online here.