A Writer's Desk

Fun with Homonyms

2012-01-30T05:34:00.001-08:00

Book Riot revels in them.

From the piece...

If you said “newspaper,” congratulations—you know how to recognize a homonym! Also, you must remember a time when newspapers were actually “read all over.”*

*I prefer this less-tactful version: “What’s black and white and red all over and can’t fit through a revolving door? A nun with a spear through her head.” But, alas, no homonyms.

In the technical linguistic sense, a homonym is a set of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation, but have different meanings.

Want a list of homonyms? Alan Cooper's obsessed with them.

Ansel Adams - Photographer of...Los Angeles?

2012-01-30T05:33:00.001-08:00

Indeed.

Why Movie Posters Are Trying to Throw Off Your Balance

2012-01-30T05:32:00.002-08:00

There's a short piece in New York Magazine about titled movie posters.

From the piece...

Key art, of course, moves in cycles. Witness the “distressed type” fad of a few years ago, which has given rise to the current obsession with Futura font. The idea behind the tilting trend is that it forces our brains to engage with the poster's image and mentally correct it: Just as we can't help ourselves from adjusting a picture frame that's hanging askew, you've mentally engaged with and corrected the poster before you even realized you've been paying attention to it.

"A Wrinkle in Time" and Its Sci-Fi Heroine

2012-01-30T05:32:00.001-08:00

The New York Times revels in the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time.

From the essay...

But for those who came of age anytime during the past half-century, the most startling transformation occurred upon reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It was under L’Engle’s influence that we willed ourselves to be like Meg Murry, the awkward girl who suffered through flyaway hair, braces and glasses but who was also and to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.

Meg Murry, in short, was a departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist — as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Meg was a heroine of science fiction.

25 Pieces of Awesome Literary Street Art

2012-01-29T05:56:00.001-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Five Books That Inspire the Most Tattoos

2012-01-29T05:55:00.002-08:00

The list, care of Publishers Weekly.

The Amazing 1966 Batman Trading Cards

2012-01-29T05:55:00.001-08:00

Enjoy!

A Master of Arts in...Crime Writing?

2012-01-28T07:03:00.000-08:00

You betcha.

From a piece in the Guardian...

As the underworld steadily increases its grip on literary culture, City University in London is turning to crime, with the launch of an MA devoted to teaching crime fiction and thriller writing.

Launched in response to student demand, and to the growing popularity of the genre, the UK's first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels is another harbinger of a "second golden age of crime writing".

The genre is the second biggest in the UK, according to official data, with sales of £87.6m in 2011, while debut thriller Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson topped the charts last week. The course will teach budding Agatha Christies and Ian Rankins everything from how to create suspense to new ways to tackle new crimes, thoroughly investigating all aspects of the genre, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers.

Conserving the Magna Carta

2012-01-28T06:51:00.002-08:00

Ten "Alice in Wonderland" Inspired Tales on Film

2012-01-28T06:51:00.001-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Six Authors Who Moonlighted as Lyricists

2012-01-28T06:50:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the L Magazine.

On the Making of Habibi

2012-01-28T06:49:00.001-08:00

It took the graphic novelist Craig Thompson seven years to complete Habibi, his epic exploration of child slavery and sexual awakening in an imaginary Middle-Eastern kingdom.

He charts its creation from first thoughts to finished pages, here.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

2012-01-27T05:08:00.001-08:00

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Doomsday Speeches

2012-01-27T05:07:00.001-08:00

What if D-Day failed? What if the first men on the moon didn't come back? If these landmark events had ended in tragedy, what would General Eisenhower and President Nixon have said?

From a piece in the Atlantic...

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

70 Years in Comics

2012-01-27T05:06:00.002-08:00

IGN interviews the legendary Stan Lee.

From said interview...

IGN: [laughs] What would you say is the biggest way that the comic book industry has changed in your lifetime? From when you started to where you are now?

Lee: To me, the two biggest changes are, one, they use computers now for the coloring and for the lettering. Another way is, it used to be you just had people that wanted to write and draw comics in the business. Now, you get people who are professional and highly selling novelists writing comics. You get the top artists drawing comics.

And the reason is, they're always thinking, "Gee, if this books turns out good they'll make a movie out of it and I'll become rich and famous!" Or, richer and more famous. So we have very important people now working on comics that wouldn't have gone anywhere near them a few decades ago. That's a big change.

The Poem Forest

2012-01-27T05:06:00.001-08:00

Poem Forest took place November 2011 at the New York Botanical Garden, which was celebrating the renovation of its 50-acre old-growth forest. The Garden, in conjunction with the Poetry Society of America, asked Jon Cotner to do something poetry-related on site.

Here is what he did.

Maurice Sendak on the Colbert Report

2012-01-26T05:56:00.001-08:00

Part I:

Part II:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Top Ten Book of the Night

2012-01-26T05:42:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Guardian.

Moby-Dick Toilet Paper?

2012-01-26T05:33:00.001-08:00

Moby-Dick toilet paper.

Astronomical

2012-01-26T05:32:00.001-08:00

Twelve 506 page volumes printed-on-demand, representing a scale model of our solar system from the Sun to Pluto.

In other words, awesome...

ASTRONOMICAL - The Movie from Mishka Henner on Vimeo.

The Month of Letters Challenge

2012-01-26T05:31:00.002-08:00

Can you send out a letter every day in the month of February?

From a piece on Mary Robinette Kowel's blog...

When was the last time you got a letter in the mail? December sees a lot of mail and you remember that sense of delight when the first card arrives. You can have that more often.

I have a simple challenge for you.

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.

Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 24 items. Why 24? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 24 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month. You might enjoy going to the mail box again.

Man Ray's Avant-Garde Photos of His Famous Friends

2012-01-26T05:31:00.001-08:00

Enjoy!

Robert Burns - Terrorist?

2012-01-25T05:29:00.001-08:00

If he were alive and writing today? Yes.

From an article in the Scotsman...

ROBERT Burns’ great song Scots, Wha Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled is considered by many to be an appeal for insurrection. It is not so much about Wallace and Bruce but about Burns using their example to incite the struggle against an increasingly tyrannical and corrupt government in London. The last line “Liberty’s in every blow / Let us do – or die” is not only an incitement to direct violence, it also directly connects Burns with the armed revolutionary struggle then ongoing in France; “Let us do – or die” being the French revolutionaries’ battle cry

Samina Malik, a shop assistant at Heathrow Airport, was the first woman to be convicted under the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000. She was charged with the crime of “possessing records likely to be used for terrorism”. Among these “records” were a number of poems inciting jihad. She was found guilty and sentenced, a judgment later overturned on appeal.

The parallels between Burns and Malik are obvious: radicalised politics; associating with others of a like mind; connections with foreign terrorist groups and a call to insurrection. So how would Robert Burns, who styled himself a “son of sedition”, fare if he were to be judged by the standards of our current anti-terror legislation? Would we find him detained in Barlinnie Prison, languishing in solitary confinement and composing his jail diaries? If Scots Wha Hae could be indictable under our contemporary terror legislation, for what else might Burns have been prosecuted?

The Avengers - the Cologne?

2012-01-25T05:28:00.001-08:00

Smell like Thor today!

NBC News - Book Publishers?

2012-01-25T05:27:00.000-08:00

Indeed.

Shelf Lives - Four Centuries of Book Collectors and Their Books

2012-01-25T05:26:00.000-08:00

This sounds like a great exhibit.

From the Cambridge University Library...

With more than eight million items on its shelves, Cambridge University Library is one of the largest accumulations of books and manuscripts in Europe, and one of the most important in the world. But its holdings are not a single, uniform entity: instead they consist of a great variety of different collections which, over the centuries, by one route or another, have come to be housed under the same roof. Some of the most remarkable of these are the collections gathered by ardent individual book-lovers, whose intensely personal passions for acquiring rare and beautiful volumes have, through the eventual deposit of their treasures in the Library, gone on to enrich the national heritage.

This exhibition presents ten such collectors, whose lives span the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. As well as placing on display some of the most splendid, distinctive and—in a few cases—unexpected items held in the Library, it allows us to observe the changing motives, fashions and tastes of book-collectors over the course of four hundred years.

Photographers With Their Famous Photographs

2012-01-24T06:11:00.000-08:00

Enjoy!

Holy Solitude

2012-01-24T05:59:00.001-08:00

Kong Yalei, for Granta, revels in the quiet revelation that is reading.

From the short essay...

I felt satisfied because I felt solitary. I treasure this solitude. It’s my holy solitude. Maybe now there is nothing holy in modern China – except Money. But at least to me, Solitude is holy. It means that in spite of everything else, I still can do something I want to do, such as reading. I’m always a keen reader of western literature. I love Raymond Carver, Paul Auster, Geoff Dyer, Alice Munro and many others. My favourite magazines on this planet are The New Yorker, Harper’s (an American friend ordered these two magazines’ digital subscriptions for me as a gift), and, Granta (I met with the editor John Freeman, in Beijing, just two days before the Congress, and we talked about books so happily – like two killers talking about guns – that he also gave me a digital subscription, also as a gift). I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature.

How to Write Like a Funny Woman

2012-01-24T05:53:00.000-08:00

Elissa Bassist recently took some improv classes. She's trying to use those tools in her writing.

From a story on the Rumpus...

1. Be in a scene (a place, a time, an action). I used to start scenes with a joke and go from there; one day my teacher, the venerable Chelsea Clarke, stopped me and said, “Be rowing a boat.” I began rowing a fake boat, and suddenly, I was a character in a boat; the audience knew where I was and what I was doing.

It’s similarly knee-jerk to start a chapter discussing the metaphysics of unrequited love or whatever, but that’s disorientating to your reader because it’s like soliloquizing in space. Put your reader in a scene. Make one character be unrequitedly in love with another character rowing her boat.

1a. Relatedly, I wrote a chapter that is 80% me talking about my emotions and blowjobs. After an hour-long conversation with an editor about how to organize/overhaul this chapter, she finally said, “Elissa! Get out of the talky headspace, and present [verb] moments, rather than talk on and on about them. Basically, I need to see the blowjob. Take me into the blowjob room.” Take your readers into the blowjob room.

2. Play to the top of your intelligence. I wish I could explain this one better, but I think I just like the phrase, “Play to the top of your intelligence.” (Here is what Google says: ”If your character is stupid, be smart about how you’re stupid,” which I take to mean, be stupid in a specific way).

2a. I am trying to write a book. The book begins with me as a college student, a nineteen-year-old girl. I did a lot of dumb shit at that age. As the writer/present-day narrator (no longer a college student, no longer a teenager), I have to be smart about showing that young girl doing dumb shit.

What Fiction Can Teach Us About Love

2012-01-24T05:50:00.000-08:00

Reading fiction, from Virgil to Jane Austen to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a great way to learn about the ways of the heart—and to avoid getting heartsick.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

When E.M. Forster asked a hypothetical reader in his book Aspects of the Novel why he read fiction, the character said, “It seems a funny sort of question to ask—a novel’s a novel—well, I don’t know—I suppose it tells a story, so to speak.” The story is essential, of course, to keep us engaged. But those of us who are drawn to novels aren’t there purely for entertainment (particularly not in this era when we can watch all the movies, television shows, and viral videos we want). No, most of us go between the pages to get inside different minds and learn more about how people tick. It’s no coincidence that the world’s best novelists are some of our most outstanding psychologists. (Just ask Freud, who thought Dostoyevsky was revelatory.)

When it comes to figuring out crucial lessons of human behavior, timeless works of fiction are unparalleled primers. As Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, recently told the Guardian: “Reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way [of] making the world a better place by improving [empathy] … but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education.” Fiction can also, I’ve found, shed plenty of light on our romantic lives. In fact, I myself have learned so much about my own amorous trials and tribulations from great stories that I was inspired to write a book about it: the just-published Much Ado About Loving: What Our Favorite Novels Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-so-great Gatsbys, and Love in the Time of Internet Dating.

Woven Newspaper Portraits

2012-01-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

The beautiful artwork of Gugger Petter.

Amazon.com - The Predator

2012-01-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

Publishers and booksellers discuss Amazon.com's foray into book publishing on NPR.

From the piece...

Publishers have a problem when it comes to discussing Amazon: They may fear its power, but they are also dependent on it, because like it or not, Amazon sells a lot of books. But lately, the grumbling about Amazon has been growing louder, with some in the book industry openly describing Amazon's tactics as "predatory."

Publishers have long complained about Amazon's pricing policies; it sold e-books at cut-rate prices in order to win customers for the Kindle. Now, explains Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher at O'Reilly Media, Amazon is undercutting competitors by selling e-readers, like the new Kindle Fire, at a loss.

"The word 'predator' is pretty strong, and I don't use it loosely," he says, "but ... I could have sworn we had laws against predatory pricing. I just don't understand why that's not an issue — because that's got to be hurting other device makers out there in trying to capture this market."

States of Play

2012-01-24T05:34:00.001-08:00

The Financial Times discusses Americans' love of sports and then writing about it.

From the piece...

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a1322128-41d2-11e1-a1bf-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1kI3WO0TJ

I first read The Sportswriter not long after it was published – it was a gift from my father – and it seemed entirely new and fresh, so unlike the English novels I’d read. I couldn’t imagine that the English writers I was being encouraged to read at that time – William Golding, Graham Greene, John Fowles – would begin a novel as Ford did or write with the same idiomatic freedom and confidence about the centrality of sport in our lives. I used to think that a choice had to be made between sport and literature; that you couldn’t be both a sportsman and a book man. They represented two separate and distinct cultures, the life of the mind and the life of action, and there was no connecting bridge between them.

I was wrong, of course, but it took me many years and the emergence of the new memoir-writing about sport, inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out in the early 1990s, to understand why. I realise now that my misunderstanding was bound up with class anxieties about what was an appropriate subject for serious and considered study and reflection, the failures of English education (mine, at least) and, above all, with the absence of a literary tradition.

The End of Pop-Up Books?

2012-01-24T05:33:00.001-08:00

It’s too early to say that pop-up books are dead, but it seems clear that a lot of the fun they presented has been channeled into ebooks and book apps for kids.

From a story on the Daily Beast...

Anyone worried about the future can exhale—sort of. Pop -up books aren’t dead, they’ve just turned into book apps. The apps for, say, Peter Rabbit or Alice in Wonderland are the easiest to compare to old fashioned pop-up books, thanks to their traditional stylings and digital pull-tabs. They inhabit a strange middle ground between ebook and app: not strictly text but also not quite Angry Birds. They are what ebooks would look like if their illustrations came to life.

The other digital successors to old fashioned pop-ups are magazine apps, such as those for GQ and Esquire, with their interactive doodads, moving images, and digital easter eggs if you shake your screen just so.

Magazine apps and book apps for kids may be the new pop-ups, but that doesn’t mean we should go all Fahrenheit 451 just yet.

Botanists Agree to Loosen Latin's Grip

2012-01-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

Latin's dead and getting deader. From a piece in the Washington Post about how botanists are starting to name things in English...

For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t.

“The new chatter is in chemicals and molecules,” said Laurence Dorr, one of three Latinists in the Smithsonian Institution’s botany department who would help their colleagues translate. “It was heading toward extinction,” said Warren Wagner, department chair.

The change, which took effect Jan. 1, is more than just academic. Smithsonian botanists alone might introduce as many as 100 new plant species a year, discovered either on their travels or in the national herbarium, a collection of 5 million dried specimens housed at the Natural History Museum. Globally, scientists discover 2,000 new species per annum. As many as one in five of the world’s plant species have yet to be identified, and not until they are named and known to the scientific community can they can be protected and studied further. “You can’t talk about it until that point,” said James Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. “It’s not the end of knowing a species, it’s the beginning.”

War Horse - From Page, to Stage, to Screen

2012-01-23T05:44:00.000-08:00

Audubon's "Birds of America" Flies High

2012-01-23T05:43:00.002-08:00

How high? An American just spent $7.9 million on a first edition.

From a piece in the New York Daily News...

The winning price was within the presale estimate of $7 million to $10 million for the work, which depicts more than 400 life-size North American species in four monumental volumes and is considered a masterpiece of ornithology art.

Another complete first edition of “The Birds of America” sold at Sotheby’s in London in December 2010 for $11.5 million, a record for the most expensive printed book sold at auction.

The 3 1/2-foot-tall books feature hand-colored prints of all the species known to Audubon in early 19th-century North America. Audubon insisted on the book’s large format — printed on the largest handmade sheets available at the time — because of his desire to portray the birds in their actual size and natural habitat.

He found creative ways to paint them to fit the page, including showing large species feeding with their necks bent.

The set at Christie’s was offered for sale by the heirs of the Fourth Duke of Portland, who died in 1854.

The Handmaid's Tale

2012-01-23T05:43:00.001-08:00

It has been banned in schools, made into a film and an opera, and the title has become a shorthand for repressive regimes against women. Margaret Atwood discusses her most famous work in the Guardian.

From the piece...

The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions: "Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale" and "Here comes The Handmaid's Tale" have become familiar phrases. It has been expelled from high schools, and has inspired odd website blogs discussing its descriptions of the repression of women as if they were recipes. People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid's Tale tattooed on them, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" and "Are there any questions?" being the most frequent. The book has had several dramatic incarnations, a film (with screenplay by Harold Pinter and direction by Volker Schlöndorff) and an opera (by Poul Ruders) among them. Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe'en and also for protest marches – these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness. Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book.

I began this book almost 30 years ago, in the spring of 1984, while living in West Berlin – still encircled, at that time, by the Berlin Wall. The book was not called The Handmaid's Tale at first – it was called Offred – but I note in my journal that its name changed on 3 January 1985, when almost 150 pages had been written.

10 Cult Literary Traditions for Die Hard Fans

2012-01-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Guidebooks to Babylon

2012-01-22T07:51:00.001-08:00

Old guidebooks of vice are warmly discussed on the New York Times.

From the piece...

To the uninitiated, these clandestine directories make the most dubious of all literary subgenres. They were created, of course, to provide practical information for gentlemen travelers venturing through a city’s demimonde, and so have titles that range from mildly risqué (“The Pretty Women of Paris,” “Directory to the Seraglios”) to unashamedly coarse (“A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks and Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women and Others of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe”). The prose is rarely distinguished. Many of the guidebooks doubled as cheap erotica, filled with unsavory jokes and double-entendres. And even the most successful were designed to be disposable. Written anonymously (or with pseudonyms worthy of Bart Simpson, like A. Butt Ender or Free Loveyer), they were printed on poor-quality paper in pocket-size editions, distributed under the table and generally discarded soon after use.

But today, the rare survivals of these flimsy publications are revered — at least by social historians. There is no more vivid means of evoking the shadowy back streets, raucous taverns and perfumed boudoirs of a vanished city than to pore over a prostitute directory’s brittle, yellowed pages. “Historians love it when they stumble across these guides,” said Debby Applegate, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who is working on a biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan’s most famous madam from the 1920s to the ’40s. “They’re like underground directories to a city. They tell you a huge amount, including how prostitution was so much more widespread than people realize, seeping far beyond the red-light districts.”

15 of the Greatest Literary Mustaches

2012-01-22T07:49:00.001-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

2012-01-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

The list, care of the Inky Fool.

Hint: The #1 entry is written by the guy above (Alexander Pope).

I Like Big Books

2012-01-21T04:34:00.001-08:00

Visions of the Arabian Nights

2012-01-21T04:33:00.000-08:00

What's the history of the Western interpretation of the Arabian Nights?

From a piece in the Times Literary Supplement...

Nowhere is the fascination felt in Western culture for the East more evident than in its avid consumption of The Arabian Nights. Ever since Antoine Galland issued the first translation in French in the early eighteenth century, the stories have become a permanent part of the Western literary and visual landscape, spawning numerous adaptations, tributes and imitations. Princess Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba have acquired the status of cultural icons; genies, flying carpets and magic lamps, once curiosities of medieval Arab and Persian mythology, are now the stock-in-trade of modern occidental fantasy. There have been musical interpretations of the tales by Rimsky-Korsakov and Weber; cartoon versions by Disney, and lavish Hollywood incarnations. The influence of the Nights extends from the poetry of Goethe to Wordsworth to Rilke, to modern fiction from Fielding through Proust to Borges. In fact, so much of European and American literature has been influenced by the tales that it would be far easier, as Robert Irwin suggests in his The Arabian Nights: A companion (1994), simply to list the handful of writers who were not influenced by them.

Irwin returns to the theme in this sumptuous history of the illustrated Western editions of The Arabian Nights. Visions of the Jinn is part bibliographical exposition, part dazzling magic lantern show: its 164 colour-saturated facsimiles, photographs and black-and-white images and their accompanying analysis offer a visually stunning and sensitive account of the European response to this important text.

Batman vs. Fox News

2012-01-21T04:32:00.000-08:00

DC Comics' superheroes come under attack in news report with echoes of 50s witchhunt.

From a piece in the Guardian...

On Wednesday, Fox 5 – a regional division of the network – aired a special report headlined "Relaunched comics using sex and violence to sell", which focused on DC comics' much-publicised back-to-basics revamp of its entire line last autumn (the publisher started all its comics again from issue number one with fresh creative teams in a bid to get new readers on board and tidy up decades of confusing continuity).

"DC Comics' characters include the likes of Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman. Today, some of these superheroes would make Archie and Veronica blush," ran the report, while comic collector Joe Blackwell opined: "They more or less darkened the characters up. Today, they introduce a lot more reality into it like homosexuality, adultery, all that stuff. It's in the books now."

Neil Bernstein, PhD, a child psychologist and author of How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble commented: "It's sort of like a fictionalised Playboy for kids at its worst."

There are obvious echoes here of a similar furore in 1954, when accusations of moral turpitude threatened to bring the entire artform crashing down.

The Essential Charles Dickens

2012-01-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

What are the must-read books written by and about the famed British author?

Ask Smithsonian.

Behind-the-Scenes Tour of Audible

2012-01-20T05:39:00.000-08:00

Seriously, What was J.D. Salinger Working On?

2012-01-20T05:32:00.001-08:00

The reclusive author died two years ago. We've learned lots about his life since, but one big question remains.

From a story on Slate...

What was Salinger writing all of those years, and is it any good?

If the fistful of Salinger letters that have emerged since 2010 impart any significant news, it is the constant confirmation by Salinger himself that he was indeed still writing during the decades of his seclusion and amassing a considerable body of work. Pages that dissatisfied the author, he burned rather than risk them being retrieved from the trash. A fire that destroyed much of his home in 1992 providentially spared his writing studio where he stored his manuscripts, convincing Salinger to purchase a small fireproof vault in which to safeguard the trove. Neighbors recall him, even at age 90, intently filling in a small notebook he apparently carried everywhere.

These and numerous other references are tantalizing clues to what may potentially prove to be the greatest group of posthumous publications since Kafka – and the hope of Salinger enthusiasts worldwide. But where is Salinger’s Max Brod?

What is the Best Vampire Novel of the Century?

2012-01-20T05:31:00.002-08:00

One of these.

Abraham Lincoln Manuscript Found

2012-01-20T05:31:00.001-08:00

President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress dated Dec. 1, 1862, containing some of his most memorable quotations about the reason for continuing to fight the Civil War has been rediscovered.

From a piece in the Journal Review...

The whereabouts of the first two of the 86 pages of Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress had been a mystery for more than a century. Researchers with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a project to identify and publish all documents written or signed by Lincoln or written to him, solved part of that mystery recently during an ongoing search at the National Archives.

The message, written by several clerks, is among Lincoln’s most famous official communications to Congress. It is a forerunner of the modern State of the Union address. Although a Congressional clerk, and not Lincoln himself, read the message to the assembled Senators and Representatives, Lincoln’s words resonate with us today. It closes with the admonition, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves … The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation … We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, this last best, hope of earth ...”

Cormac McCarthy, Screenwriter?

2012-01-19T05:38:00.000-08:00

Indeed. The novelist has turned in a 'spec' feature-film script that deals with a lawyer who becomes embroiled in drug trade in the Southwest.

From a story in the Guardian...

Deadline reports that the screenplay, called The Counselor, is set in the modern-day south-west of the US and recalls the hard-boiled world of No Country For Old Men. It depicts a respected lawyer who bites off more than he can chew after foolishly getting involved in the drug business. Such a storyline recalls Sean Penn's Golden Globe-nominated turn in the 1993 Brian De Palma gangster film Carlito's Way.

"The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac's novels," Wechsler told Deadline. Steve Schwartz added: "Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It's a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy's wit and humour in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy's most disturbing and powerful works."

Libraries are Funny

2012-01-19T05:31:00.001-08:00

Scott's Lost Last Photographs

2012-01-19T05:30:00.001-08:00

The last photographs taken by Captain Robert Scott, lost for most of the 20th century, have been bought for the nation in time for the centenary of his doomed expedition to reach the south pole on 17 January 1912.

From an article in the Guardian...

The Scott Institute was founded with money left over from the fund for the widows and orphans of Scott and his four companions, who starved and froze to death with him on their heartbreaking return after learning that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the pole. It has bought the 109 photographs, never seen by Scott himself – they were developed after he set out on the last fatal stage – for about £750,000 with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund of £704,000. They will be reunited with Scott's camera, presented by his daughter-in-law Lady Philippa Scott, in 2008. Professor Julian Dowdeswell, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: "Scott's photographs bring to life, in vivid detail, his party's sledging journey into the interior of Antarctica. From men and ponies struggling through deep snow, to panoramas of the Transantarctic mountains, the images are very powerful."

The World's Largest Qur'an

2012-01-19T05:29:00.000-08:00

A calligrapher created the 500kg book to show that his country's rich cultural heritage and traditions had survived the war.

From a piece in the Guardian...

The lavish book, with pages measuring 2.28 metres by 1.55 metres, has been certified as the world's largest by the Afghan ministry of Haj and religious affairs, according to the Kabul cultural centre that houses it.

The previous claim to the title was for a copy unveiled last year in Russia's Tatarstan region.

The Afghan Qur'an weighs 500kg and its 218 pages of cloth and paper, bound inside an embossed leather cover made from the skins of 21 goats, cost over £300,000 to create.

Mohammad Sabir Khedri, the master calligrapher behind the project, worked with nine students on a design that combines gold script with millions of tiny colourful dots, forming highly symbolic decorations around the giant pages.

"I wanted to use as many tasteful colours as possible to make this holy book look beautiful," he said, standing beside his enormous creation in a room built specially to house it.

A Rare Book Collectors Guide to the College Library Book Sale

2012-01-18T06:26:00.001-08:00

My friend, an editor of Fine Books & Collections Magazine, wrote a piece recently for the Millions.

From said piece...

As both a reader and a book collector, I’m a big fan of college library book sales. Held annually or bi-annually at colleges and universities across the country, these sales convert library discards and unwanted donations into desperately needed funds. Uncluttered by the kinds of books that glut public library sales, the college library book sale paints an interesting picture of town-gown reading habits.

When I had the opportunity to attend The Friends of the Library Used Book Sale at the State University of New York in New Paltz, I tried to get there as early as possible, knowing that ambitious local booksellers and scouts would arrive when the door opened at 8:00 a.m. Not that I was necessarily looking for an overlooked first edition (although applying my esoteric knowledge about books and collecting for profit would be fun). Lest you think that the tables were filled with the fifth edition of the MLA Handbook, I will declare up front that I did find one such diamond in the rough — a first edition of Dwight Macdonald’s Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture in a Brodart-enclosed dust jacket (always a good sign). The book was not an ex-library copy — a red flag for collectors, but not readers — and because I had studied the book in graduate school, I knew not only its academic value, but also its scarcity on the market. I had purchased my own copy about ten years ago, settling for a yellowing, faded paperback, which still sits on my shelves. It’s not a find that will make me rich, but if I chose to sell it, I could buy five New York Times bestsellers in hardcover.

Michael Jackson Sings...Robert Burns?!

2012-01-18T05:46:00.003-08:00

Indeed.

From a piece in the Guardian...

A Scottish museum may soon be home to one of Michael Jackson's unreleased albums. More than a decade after Jackson and David Gest recorded songs based on the poetry of Robert Burns, Gest reportedly intends to donate the recordings to the poet's official museum in Ayrshire.

In a career of peculiar projects, it remains one of the singer's strangest: a collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's life and work. The songs have never been made public – it was either overlooked or forgotten in the Jackson estate's search for unreleased material.

"I Know What Love Is"

2012-01-18T05:46:00.001-08:00

Read a beautiful letter written by Ansel Adams, here.

The Autumn of Joan Didion

2012-01-18T05:45:00.001-08:00

The Atlantic has a long profile of the author, here.

From the piece...

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

Didion was also recently interviewed in the Believer, here.

Today's Poetry - Finding Its Way

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

To say that poetry no longer matters is a gross misreading of the facts.

A slideshow, care of the Washington Post.

The Twilight Series Could Continue Without Twilight Books to Adapt

2012-01-17T05:40:00.001-08:00

Anything to make a little money.

From a piece in the Guardian...

It is a quandary faced by studio executives over the years: what to do with a successful movie franchise that has run out of books to adapt. But this may not be an obstacle for the Twilight films, after Lionsgate chief executive Jon Feltheimer suggested his company may continue the series beyond the November release of Breaking Dawn Part 2, supposedly the final instalment in the vampire romance saga.

Lionsgate bought Twilight studio Summit for more than $400m on Friday, and one of Feltheimer's first proclamations was to suggest his company wants to maximise profits from its newly acquired asset. The Twilght series has so far generated almost $2.5bn at the global box office.

The Twelve Best Books for Preteens

2012-01-17T05:39:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Marvel Comics to Start Facebook Game

2012-01-17T05:38:00.000-08:00

At some point this quarter, Marvel will unveil its first Facebook game. The Disney-owned company hopes that Marvel: Avengers Alliance can compete with popular Facebook games like Farmville. Find out more, here, at Inside Social Games.

Literary Friendships

2012-01-16T05:37:00.001-08:00

A slideshow, care of the Daily Beast.

Ten Great Books about Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-16T05:27:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Zora Neale Hurston Sings the Blues

2012-01-16T05:26:00.001-08:00

During the Great Depression, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston traveled from Harlem to Florida to record folk songs for the Federal Writers Project’s Florida Folklife archive.
She left behind 18 amazing recordings, telling the story of individual folk songs and singing many of the tunes herself.

Hear the recordings, here, at Sad Men.

His Hour Upon the Stage

2012-01-16T05:25:00.001-08:00

As a lifelong reader of Shakespeare’s plays, Abraham Lincoln had reservations about how they were presented.

From a piece in the American Scholar...

Abraham Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Todd was anything but smooth. At one point it helped bring on a bout of severe depression that left the future president nearly dysfunctional for a brief period and caused him to avoid Springfield’s social world for several months. In a letter to an absent friend, the future Mrs. Lincoln lamented this state of affairs and wished “that he would once more resume his Station in Society, that ‘Richard should be himself again.’ ” The expression she used is clear enough in meaning, but Lincoln’s biographers have been less certain about its source. In fact, the expression “Richard’s himself again” was in vogue in antebellum America, deriving from one of the best-known speeches in the most performed of all Shakespeare plays, Richard III. But that speech, as Lincoln himself would later point out, was not written by Shakespeare.

This curious state of affairs is surprisingly emblematic of the undernourished state of our knowledge of Lincoln’s famous affinity for Shakespeare. We have so many well-attested stories of Lincoln extolling Shakespeare as a young man in New Salem, of his carrying a volume of Shakespeare’s works around with him on the judicial circuit, of his ability (and willingness) to recite from memory long passages from Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, and of his reading from the plays by the hour to his secretaries and guests as president, that there can be little doubt of his longstanding attachment to the writings of the Bard. And although he seems to have had few opportunities to see Shakespeare’s plays performed before becoming president, he frequently attended the theater in Washington, including many performances of Shakespeare. But this well-established pattern has led his biographers and other commentators to make some unwarranted assumptions and surmises, while neglecting clues that lead to strikingly different conclusions.

Lost Brahms Piece Found

2012-01-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

An unknown work by the composer Johannes Brahms has come to light after almost 160 years following its chance discovery in a visitor's book, and will be played for the first time next week.

From an article in the Independent...

Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3, the classical music station, said: "Brahms is one of the most significant composers of the 19th century... This is a fascinating discovery; it sheds light on his work in a new way. You can absolutely recognise this as Brahms' style."

The piece was discovered by chance while Mr Hogwood leafed through manuscripts held in the US. He brought the piece to Mr Wright, who commissioned the celebrated Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff to play it for the first time. The short work will appear on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters on January 21.

The Jack the Ripper Manuscript

2012-01-15T05:51:00.000-08:00

A manuscript possibly written by Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper is to be published worldwide.

From a piece on BBC News...

It is thought to have been written in the 1920s and is entitled The Autobiography of James Carnac.

Ripper historian Paul Begg has read the whole manuscript and said it could not be dismissed as a piece of fiction as "you find all sorts of questions and lots of niggles" about its content and provenance.

The manuscript is the first time the name James Carnac has been linked to Jack the Ripper - although no public records have yet confirmed whether Carnac existed.

Other suspects have been put forward in the past by Ripper historians, but to date his true identity has never been discovered.

Amazon's Erotica Plagiarism Problem

2012-01-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.

From a piece in Fast Company...

She decided to test drive the service with Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in "gratifying leaps." But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed to misspell her own name. "Even in porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent," Sharazade says, "but this wasn't happening with these."

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon's U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula's Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

Ask Andrew: What Are Your Views on the Book Publishing Industry?

2012-01-15T05:49:00.000-08:00

Good Writing Isn't Enough

2012-01-15T05:48:00.000-08:00

The digital revolution is not only changing how books are read—it is also changing the how they are written, produced, and promoted.

From an article in the Atlantic...

The overriding message in the articles is that books are an entrepreneurial exercise, combining the selection of a subject, the self-confidence to stay with it through the reporting and writing ordeal, and a commitment to marketing the results, which for many authors is an especially unfamiliar process. Among the multiple subjects covered, one of the most informative is how traditional sales strategies are adapting to the digital age. Here's one example: William Wheeler is a freelancer who has endured frustration in landing a book contract, but has the persistence and a resume (a recent New York Times story about Libya was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) that should eventually lead to success. "What transforms journalists into nonfiction authors," he writes, "is the heft of their voice, the narrative arc of their idea and its marketability. These aren't lessons that tend to be reinforced on the way up the newspaper ladder... Marketing the idea—and selling you as its author—is everything in getting to write a book." With the support of an agent, Wheeler circulated a conventional proposal about environmental crises and collected rejections from publishers who said they liked the idea but felt that the genre was too crowded. Recovering from the disappointment, Wheeler then sold an expansion of another Libya story to Byliner, an innovative new e-book publisher whose founder, John Tayman, writes in his Nieman Reports article that "our idea was to create a new way for writers to be able to tell stories at what had always been considered a financially awkward length."

Press Pause Play

2012-01-14T05:40:00.001-08:00

The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities.

But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world's most influential creators of the digital era.

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

Fifty Coolest Books Ever

2012-01-14T05:39:00.001-08:00

The list, care of Short List.

Seven Authors Who Started Writing Late in Life

2012-01-14T05:38:00.000-08:00

A list, care of the Huffington Post.

Ten Rock Stars Who Should Really Write Novels

2012-01-14T05:37:00.000-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Broken Tower

2012-01-13T05:41:00.000-08:00

A James Franco movie about poet Hart Crane:

Top Ten Novels That Nail the College Experience

2012-01-13T05:29:00.002-08:00

The list, care of Top Online Colleges.

What We Talk About When We Talk about Running Books

2012-01-13T05:29:00.001-08:00

AbeBooks has run out and put together a nice collection of running books, here.

Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe

2012-01-13T05:28:00.001-08:00

The list, care of Bleeding Cool.

Love Advice from John Steinbeck to His Son

2012-01-13T05:27:00.001-08:00

Enjoy the sweet letter, here.

An Animated Version of The Hobbit

2012-01-12T05:25:00.001-08:00

Top Ten Books about the Internet

2012-01-12T05:24:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Guardian.

Shudder...What Happens When You Stop Reading Books?

2012-01-12T05:23:00.003-08:00

Ask Jonathan Gourlay (not pictured above).

From a piece on the Bygone Bureau...

A few months ago, I stopped reading books.

At night I crawl into bed and thumb my iPhone to life. I watch Star Trek: Voyager on the Netflix app. It’s not a bad show. But somehow it is difficult to compare the weeks it took to complete the seven-season voyage through the Delta Quadrant with Capt. Janeway and the weeks I spent reading my favorite books — thick books by Eliot, Laxness, Dickens, and Pamuk. I know there is an argument that serialized television drama is as complex and soul-nourishing as a good book, but, unfortunately, I don’t care for the shows that are usually held up as modern classics for non-readers: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. I have never seen an episode of these shows. If you want to reach me, say it with alien explosions and busty cyborgs.

Back when I was a reader, it often troubled me when friends claimed that they had no time to read. Was it possible that their lives were so full of wonders that they could not spend five minutes here or there to read? How was it that my life, in comparison, seemed to offer so many chunks of reading time throughout the day? A train ride, a late-night break, and an office wait. Through marriage, babies, graduate schools, and new jobs, I always found time to read for pleasure.

Elton John to Pen AIDS Books

2012-01-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

Love Is the Cure, due in July, will include reminiscences about Freddie Mercury and teenage activist Ryan White.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Elton John is writing his first book, a collection of memories and meditations on the fight against Aids. Love Is the Cure: Ending the Global Aids Epidemic, due in July, will be accompanied by an audiobook read by the singer.

"[Aids] is a disease that must be cured not by a miraculous vaccine," John wrote, "but by changing hearts and minds, and through a collective effort to break down social barriers and to build bridges of compassion." The singer said he wants to combat the stigma surrounding the disease, telling personal stories of friends he has lost – and those he has kept.

10 Books for a Good Cry

2012-01-11T05:37:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Kids Prefer E-Books to Printed Books

2012-01-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

So says a recent study.

From a piece on Digital Book World...

Given the choice between reading e-books or print books, children prefer e-books, a new, exploratory field study shows. Children who read e-books also retain and comprehend just as much as when they read print books, the study also suggests.

A new “QuickStudy” – so named for its short duration and the small size of its sample group – from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center observed 24 families with children ranging in age from three-to-six reading both print and e-books in the Summer and Fall of 2011. Most of the children in the study preferred reading an e-book to a print book and comprehension between the two formats were the same.

“If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said Carly Shuler, senior consultant for industry studies at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is a New York based non-profit organization dedicated to understanding how children learn through digital media.

Labyrinth Gets Graphic Novel Prequel?

2012-01-11T05:35:00.001-08:00

It's true.

From an article in the Guardian...

New light is set to be cast on David Bowie's enigmatic, tight-trousered portrayal of Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's cult children's fantasy film Labyrinth through a graphic novel prequel out later this year.

A deal between the Jim Henson Company and comics publisher Archaia to publish graphic novels based on Henson's creations has already seen adaptations of Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal. Now a long-rumoured Labyrinth comic is on the cards, with illustrator Brian Froud, who worked on the original film, to oversee character design and conception.

Released in 1986, Labyrinth told of young girl Sarah's quest to rescue her baby brother Toby from the labyrinth of the Goblin King, after she wishes the goblins will take him away in a fit of anger. Jennifer Connelly played the part of Sarah, with a big-haired Bowie attempting to seduce her into staying with him in the labyrinth as the Goblin King Jareth: "I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave," he says to Sarah.

Comic Sans Project

2012-01-11T05:34:00.001-08:00

We are the Comic Sans defenders. We fear no fonts and we will make the whole world Comic Sans. Because Helvetica is sooo 2011.

Enjoy.

The Joy of Books

2012-01-10T05:59:00.000-08:00

Ten Inappropriate Coloring Books That Actually Exist

2012-01-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Love Notes of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn

2012-01-10T05:52:00.002-08:00

The handwritten prayer book love notes sent by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn before they married reveal the intensity of the king’s passion for his future wife.

From a piece in the Daily Mail...

Henry VIII is thought to have begun his pursuit of Miss Boleyn in 1526 but she proved reluctant to yield to his attempts to seduce her as she did not want to simply become a mistress in the way her sister Mary had.

The year before the notes were said to have been written the king had unsuccessfully tried to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled by the pope in 1527.

He finally married Anne Boleyn in 1533 but she was executed three years later.

Traditional Books - Dressed to Kill

2012-01-10T05:52:00.001-08:00

Luxury craftsmanship and an eye for aesthetics are just the thing to give hardbacks an edge in their battle with ebooks. So says the Guardian.

From the piece...

The pleasures of E means downloading the new book we fancy, from reviews, word-of-mouth or plain curiosity. The satisfactions of P come from acquiring lovely print editions for our bookshelves. In due course, but not quite yet, the world's writers and their agents will work out how fully to monetise this double market.

One unintended consequence of this irreversible trend has been to give the hardback a new lease of life. If the ebook is all about ease, and short attention spans, the ink and paper book must satisfy not just the thrill of reading, but the deep aesthetic pleasure associated with owning, holding and even scenting a favourite text. Already, there are signs that some publishers have cottoned on to this.

Not since the palmy days of late-Victorian publishing has so much care and attention been lavished on the hardback.

The Soundtrack to Our Books

2012-01-10T05:51:00.001-08:00

I'm listening to Mahler right now as I read a book about World War I. Do you listen to music while reading?

From a piece in the Millions about how publishers are trying to find ways to incorporate audio in the reading experience...

Of late, publishers and authors have begun to experiment more with audio as a natural step in the promotion of their books. Listening to music has always been an organic piece of literary consumption — anyone who has queued up a favorite record of sad ballads while reading a heartbreaking novel, in order to up the emotional catharsis can attest to that. But recent trends suggest that readers are looking for even more direct ways to incorporate music into the reading experience.

coverAt readings for You Must Go And Win, Simone also performed her songs live, and since then, all of her appearances have morphed into music and literary mash-ups: She played live at benefits for the literary mentoring organization Girls Write Now, for Guernica Magazine, and at other writers’ book release parties, including Evan Hughes’ Literary Brooklyn, as well as the Brooklyn Book Festival this fall.

When her book came out, Simone also contributed an author playlist to Largehearted Boy, a books and music blog run by David Gutowski. Since 2005, Largehearted Boy has run a beloved feature called Book Notes, for which recently published writers are asked to create a playlist for their novels; their song selections are explained in the context of both the writing experience as well as the characters in the story. Gutowski recently posted the 900th entry in the series, and has also started a Largehearted Lit series at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, dedicated to authors who participated in Book Notes, plus musical guests.

“There has definitely been a rise in author soundtracks as promotional items in a variety of formats,” says Gutowski. “From my experience, music is a great way to create a unique bond between writer and reader.” A number of authors have told Gutowski that writing the playlist essays are one of the most enjoyable pieces of promotion attached to their book tour.

Humankind's Greatest Invention Is...

2012-01-09T05:32:00.001-08:00

Writing.

From a post on More Intelligent Life...

The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.

Arthur Miller Interviewed

2012-01-09T05:31:00.001-08:00

Listen, here.

The End to Bad Heir Days

2012-01-09T05:30:00.001-08:00

The Independent discusses the James Joyce estate and copyright law.

From the article...

On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce's work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.

Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce's work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate's most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather's words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce's "pornographic" letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.

Cat Women of the Moon

2012-01-08T05:38:00.001-08:00

There's a two-part podcast, here, exploring the popular motif in science fiction of an all-women society surviving without men.

Henry Miller and Anais Nin Discuss Death and Dreams

2012-01-08T05:37:00.003-08:00

The Ten Best Clocks in Literature

2012-01-08T05:37:00.001-08:00

The list, care of the Guardian.

Dreams of Space

2012-01-08T05:36:00.001-08:00

There's a great blog, here, that highlights old space books and ephemera. Enjoy!