Has the drudgery of submitting poems, stories, and manuscripts ever gotten you down? Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, had his first novel rejected by nearly eighty publishing houses. Here’s a take on self-publishing from The Millions if all of this has got you down.
John Crow’s Devil
Monday Links
Friend of The Millions Edan Lepucki has a short story in the most recent LA Times West Magazine, "Salt Lick". Congrats!I've heard of publishers throwing in a free bookmark to help sell copies of a new book, but gold?Oriani Fallaci, the fiery (and athiest) Italian journalist who recently passed away, bequethed her library to a Pontifical university.Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam takes the Sony Reader for a spin and isn't impressed.Did you know that among this year's finalists is the first graphic novel ever to be in the running for a National Book Award? Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has been given that honor. "I can't say it's a dream come true, because it never even would have occurred to me to dream it. It wasn't in my reality," Yang says.John Hodgman is at it again with one of the more antic Washington Post chats I've ever encountered. (via Books are my only friends)
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On Reading and Personality Disorders
“Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like Hell's Belles and Kid Colt and The Legend of the Lost Arroyo and even Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.”
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Vintage Hemingway
The Toronto Star is re-releasing the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote for the paper in the early 1920s. I particularly recommend his column on bullfighting, “Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy.”
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Duck You Autocorrect
James Gleick talks to one of the software engineers behind autocorrect, that "impish god" responsible for turning our ids to I'ds and moviestars to Natalie Portmanteaus. In response, Jen Doll wonders whether we love to hate autocorrect "because when it messes up we're happily reminded that phones and computers are not actually smarter than people."
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Gun Fight at the O.K. Bookstore
Stick 'em up, partner! In a confusing marriage of literature and implicit violence, a bookstore in Austin, Texas is offering a ten percent discount to any customers openly carrying a handgun in their establishment.
Another Iraq
"In a just world, every single person who was in favor of invading Iraq would have to read this book. It would be tattooed on the eyes of the invasion's architects, force them to see everything through these writers' words." NPR reviews Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq, a collection in which 10 Iraqi authors imagine their country 100 years into the future. See also our own review of literature about the war.
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Are there actually 78 publishing houses?