Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
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The Mark Zuckerberg Book Club
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new book club, and it already has 80,000 members. Some people are hoping Facebook’s reach will make this a powerful tool akin to Oprah’s book club, once known for driving tens of thousands in…
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Notable NYC: 1/3–1/9
Monday 1/5: Jason Sokol and Brent Staples talk about All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn. Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30 p.m., free. Tuesday 1/6: Nellie Hermann discusses her novel The Season of Migration with Chris Adrian.…
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Serial: A Rumpus Roundup
This American Life spinoff Serial is a nonfiction podcast told over multiple episodes. Premiering back in October, Serial explores the case of Adnan Syed, who has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Much…
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Happy New Year, in Multiple Dimensions
To celebrate the New Year, Electric Literature is giving away an interactive short story app from acclaimed Israeli author Alex Epstein! True Legends is a multi-dimensional app exploring the story of a blind piano tuner. Alongside Epstein’s story, the app features…
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The Joy of Writing
What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the…
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The Second Time Around
2014 wasn’t just the year of the debut—plenty of authors released their second novel, often considered the most challenging for writers to write. Slate sat down with some second-time novelists to discuss their sophomore efforts, like Family Life author Akhil…
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Don’t Read That Book
The history of banning books is almost as old as book themselves. Now Electric Literature has featured an infographic from Printerinks.com exploring that history, beginning with the Bible in 1440 and leading up to The Da Vinci Code in 2003.
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The Scorpion Always Bites the Turtle
During Amazon’s skirmish with Hachette, one group that rallied to Amazon’s defense were the self-published authors who claimed that the Kindle allowed their overlooked voices a platform. Now, those authors find themselves sinking as the online retailer has turned on…
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Notable NYC: 12/27–1/2
Saturday 12/27: Frank Garcia and Jon Bershad stage a live reading of The Interview, based on the motion picture censored by Sony Pictures. Treehouse 154, 7 p.m., free. Thursday 1/1: Adam Fitzgerald, Adeena Karasick, Alan Felsenthal, Alan Gilbert, Alex Cuff,…
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Dickens Gave Us Christmas, and Ghosts
Today there is plenty of fretting over the “War on Christmas,” but the holiday didn’t always hold such importance in everyday lives, even for Christians. Two hundred years ago, industrialization gave people a lot more to worry about than Black…
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Small Presses, Big Problems
Have you ever considered what it would be like to run a small press? J. David Osborne, who runs Broken River Books, explains just what happens in a typical day: I check my email. There’s someone who’s interested in submitting…
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Protecting Our Writing
Though copyrights on creative works are automatic, those protections get complicated quickly, especially when it comes to publication. Howard Richard Debs breaks down the basics of copyrights for writers, explaining over at The Review Review some of the elemental concepts…