Recommended Reading: this moving piece from Andrew Higgins at The Rumpus on admissions of guilt.
I Will Remember
Brave New Serial
Margaret Atwood's got a new book called Positron out, and she's going digital: the novel is being published serially via Byliner.
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Joan
Sara Davidson's Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion is an intimate portrait of one of America's most revered and private writers.
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What Ails You
Recommended Reading: Andrew Solomon on tribal cures for depression.
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Introducing The Offing
Trend alert: there's been a surprising proliferation of literary site spinoffs lately. First The Toast began The Butter, and then Electric Literature started Okey-Panky. Now the Los Angeles Review of Books joins the movement with The Offing, an online lit mag launching later this month.
Appearing Elsewhere
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York's trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
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Amazon’s Price-Check Debacle
A lot of people were outraged by initial reports of Amazon's price-check promotion, and a lot of that had to do with misinformation. Thankfully, Richard Russo sets the record straight about at least one point of contention. (The discount doesn't apply to books.)
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Pervasive Poetry
“Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost’s poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, ‘The Road Not Taken’ appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse.” David Orr writes for The Paris Review about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” one of the most misread poems of the English language.