In the article Sparks “compares himself to Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hemingway” and “slams Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as ‘pulpy’ and ‘overwrought.’” He also states, “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”
Well Mohr won’t stand for it, and he throws down the gauntlet: “Let’s tussle soon, you and me; before you write another thing.” It all makes for some fun Friday reading; it’d be even better if Sparks answered the challenge.
While a lot of sites are covering the music, tech, film, and other happenings in Austin this week, only Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser of SMITHmag.net are capturing the essence of how many amazing t-shirts there are in Texas right now.
WikiLeaks, “the Internet service that offers whistleblowers an opportunity to publish documents that expose corruption and wrongdoing by state and private actors,” has drawn the ire of many corporations in the past, not to mention “North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, and a number of private Swiss banks.”
“The best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader, ‘How would you cope in this situation?’ Or saying, ‘How would you feel about living in a world in which this these crimes are allowed to happen?’”
Over at The Awl Choire Sicha talks with Paul Ford, the now-former web editor of Harper’s, about why he quit, what’s going on at the magazine (“Jennifer Szalai, a senior editor, who handled reviews, also quit this week”), his plans for the future, and his favorite Alex Chilton tale.
“Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge of the discussions.”
“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”
That’s what William Faulkner said in 1950 while accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, and he should know, because “even Faulkner had a day job.”
(For those interested, you can read Faulkner’s entire Nobel speech here.)
We’ve previously mentioned the fascinating battle taking place in San Francisco between the city’s two weekly newspapers: The San Francisco Bay Guardian (who won a $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices) and the VVM-owned SF Weekly.
Well The Stranger has the full scoop on the story, one which includes (but is not limited to) “seized delivery vans, murderous editors, irate blog posts, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more.” Read “The Great West Coast Newspaper War.”
Update: An interesting argument has broken out in the piece’s comments section about book reviews and reviews in general (it somewhat mirrors a similar debate we had here).
“The recent recession hit the book industry just like it did every other business, and even though we’re emerging from the chasm, book sales haven’t completely recovered, so publishers are being much more careful than they were a few years ago.”
GalleyCat talks with literary agent Jim Donovan, who has been in the business for 17 years and has “seen the world of books from every angle, editor, book seller, and author.”
“Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google’s Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing’s censorship rules.”
So when is that new facebook friend not really a friend? When they’re a law enforcement agent using your online info against you. Whether checking an alibi against status updates or looking at photos for signs of suspicious activity, the FBI and police have turned social media sites into citizen monitoring tools à la Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Think of a bookplate as a wedding ring binding the reader to the book, and vice versa. The symbolism isn’t so far apart: ownership, possession, desire. [...] The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own.”
“Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they’re running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.”
“The reason I’m still around through all this is persistence. And the fact that I’ve always gone for myself, in that I’ve never hooked onto a trend, it was just me doing me.”
“It’s actually quite frightening to be an author and know the business side of publishing. I imagine it’s easier to be in Iowa and not know what’s going on with your book. If the industry had stayed the same, I might still feel in control of the publishing process, but sales reps’ jobs have changed, marketing jobs have changed, publicity jobs have changed.”
Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals by the age of 25.
He has also written for AlterNet, McSweeney's, and Mother Jones. He is the managing editor of The Rumpus. Follow him on Twitter.
