The “David Mamet Appliance Center” has some predictably abrasive customer service representatives. Here is Peter McCleery for McSweeney’s imagining a hilarious and existentially hopeless exchange between customer and technician. The Millions has even more to satisfy your fictitious-Mamet fix: an imagined symposium with Mamet, Francine Prose, and James Wood among others.
David Mamet Appliance Center
New Miéville Fiction
There’s new fiction from China Miéville up at Tor. Miéville’s been a Millions darling for quite some time now, as these two pieces from Bill Morris can attest.
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Depression Books
Journalist and author Simon Winchester highlights five books "that shed light on the social history of his adopted homeland, from the late 19th century to the Great Depression." We're pleased to see Millions Hall-of-Famer Stoner make the cut.
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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.
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Along “The Colbert Bump”
"The Colbert Bump didn’t get so much media attention and public support because everyone wanted to talk about me and my novel. People wanted to support book culture, to say that books and writers matter, and that we should be doing everything we can to ensure their continued existence, if not their success. In short, The Book is not dead!" Our own Edan Lepucki and Stephan Eirik Clark talk about their experiences as debut authors on "The Colbert Bump," and the piece pairs nicely with Edan and Millions staff writer Bill Morris's article about the many paths writers follow to publication.
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The Ethics of Illegal Downloads
None other than Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist" of the New York Times, has decided that illegally downloading an e-book version of a book for which you've already paid full price in hardcover is "not unethical... subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod." He adds, "Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology."
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A Master’s In Self-Publishing?
Because its administrators believe “self-publishing is now a highly successful and respected business model for both new and established authors,” The University of Central Lancashire has created a Self-Publishing Masters program. (Clearly they didn’t read Edan Lepucki’s Millions article from 2011.) According to the program’s official website, “this dynamic course … reveals how to make self-publishing work for you.”
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