Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
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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 even while in distant logging camps. The Bonner mill library…
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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 Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star. Her successful campaign raised…
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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: Bill Roorbach and Heidi Pitlor discuss their new novels with…
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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 likely to win a prize are books by men, about…
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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 Review, takes a look at how some publications handle the…
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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 prestigious Oxford professorship. He also turned down the poet laureateship…
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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, and has been publishing them on Instagram. The Guardian shares some of…
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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 Statesman takes a look at what this means: The gender…
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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 race to embrace the Chinese market and bring Chinese authors to…
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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 talks with Lydia Black about Old Guy Dad, a collection…
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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 120,000 short story entries from British children under thirteen to…
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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 stave off the inevitable intellectual decline students face during the…