A Library for Lumberjacks
Lumberjacks of yesteryear cut trees from remote camps before shipping the lumber to sawmills. One mill owner built his lumberjacks a rolling boxcar library so the workers could enjoy books…
Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
1314 posts
Ian MacAllen is the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022). His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Offing, 45th Parallel Magazine, Little Fiction, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Find him at IanMacAllen.com.
Literature’s Crowdfunded Future
From small presses to literary journals, crowdfunding has grown into a major source of money for publishing. Authors are even turning to services like Kickstarter to fund their booktours, like…
Notable NYC: 6/6–6/12
Saturday 6/6: Amy Elizabeth Bishop, Sarah Jean Grimm, Ashleigh Lambert, Nina Puro, and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke celebrate the latest issue of H-NGM-N. Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, 7 p.m., free. Sunday 6/7:…
Gender Bias in Book Awards
Women are winning fewer book prizes than men. And narratives about women don’t fair as well when it comes to prestigious prizes either. In fact, looking at the data, the most…
Disguising Payments Hurts Writers
Literary journals don’t always pay contributors. But unpaid contributions are less of a problem for writers than literary journals that conceal their pay rates. Allison Williams, over at The Review…
Larkin’s Social Anxiety
Philip Larkin disliked literary parties. He also disliked giving lectures. His general dislike of public and social events led the British poet to push back against attempts to nominate him for a…
Library Queries
Before there was Google, there was the New York Public Library. Library patrons could query librarians by writing out questions on notecards. The NYPL found a set of vintage cards,…
Wikipedia’s Sausage Party
Wikipedia has a gender problem. The site has an overwhelmingly male authorship, meaning that the contents of the encyclopedia meant to document all of human knowledge is skewed toward men. The New…
Censorship Taints Publishing Bonanza
China represents a huge marketplace for any product, and book publishers have finally caught on. More than 10,000 Chinese books were available at the Book Expo America. But as publishers…
Notable NYC: 5/30–6/5
Saturday 5/30: Roxane Gay reads and takes questions. Astoria Bookshop, 7 p.m., tickets required. Tisa Bryant and Divya Victor join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Jerry Stahl…
Young Writers Turn to Hashtags
Oxford University Press has concluded that “hashtag” is the UK children’s word of the year, with kids using the term to connote emphasis and emotions. The press analyzed more than…
Choice Encourages Reading
Students who read four to six books in a summer are more likely to maintain their reading skills between semesters. As a result, many schools develop summer reading programs to help…