Monthly Archives: January, 2012
1912’s Greatest Hits
Here’s something interesting. Last year right around this time, one of the better online literary distractions involved looking up the bestselling books on the day of your birth. This week John Scalzi took a look at the top sellers from 1912, a hundred years ago (and anyone who thinks they might want to get a [...]
I Contain Multetudes Multidudes Multitudes
From the brave folks at We Who Are About to Die, here is Walt Whitman on the subject of proofreaders: What a tribe the tribe of proofreaders is! I think some men, some writers, owe a great part of their reputations to the excellence of their proofreaders–to their vigilance, their counsel. Who can do justice [...]
A Month of Letters in February
The other day I was out walking the dog, sending a few quick texts, and I got to wondering how soon it would be before smartphones got good enough on the voice recognition to send messages that way… and then realized that what I was thinking of was a phone call. Sometimes, I guess, a [...]
ALA, Publishers Go to the Table
One bit of good news from ALA Midwinter is that big publishers will finally be sitting down to some serious discussion about eBook lending. At the end of this month Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin will be meeting in New York with ALA to broach the topic in—we hope—civilized fashion. At this point, none [...]
Guernica’s Writer’s Bloc
Last week Guernica magazine launched an interesting new project called Writers Bloc, a collection of essays by authors taking a look at education issues in problematic or developing areas outside the United States—Bosnia, Palestine, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, to name a few. The writers have fanned out far and wide, with funding from the Soros Foundation, [...]
2011 NBCC Award Finalists Announced
The National Book Critic Circle has announced the 2011 contenders for the NBCC Awards. Nominees were announced by last year’s finalists at a star-studded event in downtown Manhattan, for which a good-sized crowd “braved a few inches of city slush”—never let it be said that literary types are wimps. It’s a good list, with no [...]
Caturday
Does anyone talk about “Caturday” any more? It was such a good phone-it-in blog meme there for a while—nobody really cared if it was your cat, the neighbor’s cat, Maru, or a pile of teeny little kittens off of Cute Overload. Caturday was all right. I vote for bringing back Caturday, at least this once, [...]
Golden Doodles
I do a lot of different writing these days: academic work for school, copywriting for a buck, essays and reviews for Like Fire and other venues, and plain old chatty newsy posts like this. One of the more important tools of my trade is the lined notebook sitting on my desk, not for flashes of [...]
Contenders: The Story Prize and the Tournament of Books
One of the best things January has going for it, other than the fact of having gotten through the holidays intact, is the announcement of the finalists in two of my favorite book contests: The Story Prize and the Morning News Tournament of Books. Both of them manage to hit the interface between serious and [...]
Take Note: The Next Best Book Blog
OK, are we all reading TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog? Because if you’re not, you really should be. Aside from the oddly recursive title, which I find endearing, this is a sharp, nonfat spotlight on new and upcoming books from independent presses. While a lot of indie lists are genre-specific, or focus on the [...]
