What does the Man Booker prize mean for independent presses? On Salt, Saraband, and Oneworld, the three indie publishers with books on the Man Booker longlist this year.
Little Big League
Thursday Links
Bud offers a charming man about town piece that touches on the intersection of technology and culture.One of my biggest on-the-job challenges back when I was a bookseller was recommending books for finicky teenagers. In an effort to take some of the guesswork out of this endeavor, Anita Silvey, a professor of children’s literature at Simmons College in Boston, wrote 500 Great Books for Teens. Scripps news prints 20 of those recommendations, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and, of course, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.Germany is prosecuting seven men for burning a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, in a case that highlights the symbolic power of books.And in Trenton, NJ, librarians are accusing a library accountant of refusing to purchase the novel Whore by Tanika Lynch for the library’s collection because “he objected to the title.”
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Bad News/Good News
N+1 – we repeat – is not putting its archives online, as we surmised from a too-quick perusal of its new website. (We regret the error. Post in haste, repent at leisure.) But it might, for $75,000.
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One Award To Rule Them All
Over at Book Riot, Jeff O’Neal’s asking readers to vote for their favorite literary award… based on the quality of each one’s backlist.
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Designing ‘The Laughing Monsters’
Continuing our conversation on book covers: a look at rejected designs for Denis Johnson‘s The Laughing Monsters.
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Necessary Losses
“When people are young adults, they have these packs, or tribes, that they form. Those connections are very real, and yet another, more powerful social narrative is that you’re supposed to pair off and have children—and never see your friends again. In the case of the gay world, there’s an additional element, in which you’re supposed to spin away from your straight friends and be part of a gay world. Both ideas of adulthood are sad to me, and I was attracted to a group of friends as a lost paradise, and one that there’s no way to keep.” At The Paris Review Daily, Anna Altman talks with Caleb Crain about his new book, Necessary Errors.
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