“Reading for pleasure was linked to greater intellectual progress, both in vocabulary, spelling and mathematics. In fact, the impact was around four times greater than that of having a parent with a post-secondary degree.”
Category: publishing
National Book Awards Try To Become More Relevant
“In recent years, the National Book Awards have been criticized for nominating obscure authors whose books don’t sell as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize or the Man Booker Prize. Thus the changes instituted this year: nonwriters such as librarians, book sellers and critics have been included in the judging panels.”
Where Do Short Story Writers Fit In The New World Order?
“What do we do with the writer of 8,000-word explorations of contemporary life? Do we treat the form as apprentice work? Do we continue to associate it with the preciousness of being a writer’s writer, the limited horizon of craft labor?”
Man Booker Prize To Start Including American Writers
“The organisers increasingly believe that excluding writers from America is anachronistic. The Booker committee believes US writers must be allowed to compete to ensure the award’s global reputation”.
English: It’s Not Just For The English, Obviously
Novelists from the former British colonies “are no longer the exotic outsiders that add colour (literally as well as figuratively) to the British norm. They are the new normal.”
Jesus Is Everywhere (In Literary Fiction)
“The story in the gospels intrigues novelists because: ‘It is a story freighted with the most immense irony imaginable – the decisive embodiment of divine action and purpose and power in the human world turns out to be not only a wandering peasant shaman, but a figure who fails to persuade and ends up humiliated and executed.'”
Listen, If You’re Going To Publish Art E-Books, Make Them Special
“If digital art publishing has a future, it needs to do what can’t be done on the page.”
Wait, The U.S. Has A $100,000 Prize For Poetry?
Yep, we sure do. This year’s winner is …
Look, It’s Time To Give The Short Story Some Real Credit (But What *Is* It?)
“Nobody ever demands of an established novelist that she write a goddamn book of stories already; to write one nonetheless argues for some new twist in the long history of the form.”
If Holden Caulfield Spoke Russian, What Would He Sound Like?
“First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic.” Yet the canonical Soviet translation and a new 2008 version have wildly different tones – right down to the rendition of the novel’s title.