Jim Harrison, outdoorsman and author of Legends of the Fall, has passed away at 78. Harrison was a prolific writer whose lust for life was evident in the scores of essay and poetry collections he published during the course of his career. Our own Bill Morris has some thoughts on why Harrison never managed to garner the audience that a writer of his caliber deserved.
RIP Jim Harrison
Free Kindles for Big Readers
TechCrunch has discovered that Amazon is (essentially) giving away free Kindles to those readers who are in the prime Kindle demographic: readers who order a lot of books each year.
Longreads
This January, Penguin Random House, Goodreads, Mashable and the National Book Foundation are sponsoring National Readathon Day, a holiday which encourages Americans to join together for a marathon reading session. If you’d like to take part, you can start a fundraiser to help support reading education, or else enlist your friends and family to read with you on January 24th from noon to 4 p.m.
Introducing/A New Feature
Good news, Twitter poets! The Goddess of 140 Characters decided to let us tweet line breaks. (h/t Slate)
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The Hobbit, Animated
Sure, the trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit got everyone talking, but it’s so three weeks ago. Here’s something really fresh: a twelve-minute “animatic” version of The Hobbit produced by legendary animator Gene Deitch in 1966.
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“QB or not QB”
Is Rick Reilly’s poem about Tim Tebow so terrible that it could’ve sent “a shockwave through time, producing reverberations before it ever happen[ed]?” Matt Ufford thinks so.
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“Neglect everything else.”
“I’ve got to be writing. I have a few ways to make sure I can carve out time. Part one: Neglect everything else. Part two: Get disciplined.” David Mitchell writes about writing and the poetry of James Wright for The Atlantic. Pair with his story in tweets, “The Right Sort,” and Brian Ted Jones‘s Millions review of The Bone Clocks.
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