“[I]n the days following the election, one thing became clear: many librarians are anxious about the future.” From Carla Hayden to copyright reform, Publisher’s Weekly has the top 10 library stories of 2016. Also recommended: a piece by Daniel Penev from our own pages earlier this year, about how libraries matter now more than ever.
The Year in Libraries
Ghosts of Novels
It's always disappointing when your novel fails to get published, but what if that novel were still lurking online? At The New York Times, Jason K. Friedman writes about finding the Amazon and Google links for his novel that never made it to print. "Google admits, 'We haven’t found any reviews in the usual places,' which in this case would be the planet Earth." Pair with: Our own Edan Lepucki's essay on how to cope with not selling your novel.
Charlestopher Ditchkins
Hitchens + Dickens = Ditchens. (Or is that Hickens?)
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is "the two-person collaboration... the essential creative act"? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he's written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced - C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even "works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet." Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
The Readability Myth
Is readability a myth? In an article for The Atlantic Noah Berlatsky argues that there are no "easy" or "difficult" books, or rather that these are relative terms - a book that gives one person fits may be light reading for someone else. His argument pairs interestingly with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson's "Difficult Books" series.
Perfectly Inexplicable
Last week, I wrote about Kathryn Schulz’s innovative interview with David Mitchell, which took place on a walk along the Irish coastline. Now, in a nice complement to our own review from today, Pico Iyer reviews the author’s latest. Sample quote: “A perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can’t explain.” Our review of The Bone Clocks was published today.
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MFA vs. NYC?
At Slate, Chad Harbach weighs in on the MFA.
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