Posts by author
Kelly Lynn Thomas
-
A Bradbury Classic Turns Sixty
Sixty years ago, in 1955, Ray Bradbury published The October Country. The book has become a classic of American gothic horror, but it didn’t start out that way. Many of the stories were originally featured in Bradbury’s first-ever book, Dark…
-
Amazon Dedicates $10 Million to Translations
AmazonCrossing, the Amazon.com publishing arm that deals with works translated into English, will dedicate $10 million to expand its efforts over the next five years. This move will most likely position the publisher as the largest of translations in the…
-
Remember That I’m Human Too
While many authors have embraced social media and enjoy being available to readers, others feel that their only responsibility to the reader is to write good books. Novelist Joanne Harris sparked this conversation when she suggested a writer’s manifesto for the…
-
Publishing Industry Still Overwhelmingly White
Publisher’s Weekly has released data from its annual survey of the publishing workforce. Despite all the talk about diversity in literature, the publishing workforce remains overwhelmingly white. Of those who responded to PW’s survey, 89% are white, while only 1%…
-
From Draft to Book
NPR took a tour of the Kerlan Collection, a formerly private library of first-edition children’s books as well as original artwork, drafts of manuscripts, and other ephemera housed at the University of Minnesota: This is something you see a lot…
-
Iran Calls Rushdie Speech at Frankfurt “Anti-Cultural”
This has been organised by the Frankfurt book fair and crosses one of our political system’s red lines. We consider this move as anti-cultural,” [Seyed Abbas Salehi, deputy minister for culture and Islamic guidance] said, according to local news agencies.…
-
Italian Author Denies He Plagiarized
Daily Beast journalist Michael Moynihan recently accused Italian journalist Roberto Saviano of plagiarizing lesser-known journalists for his latest book, Zero Zero Zero. The book, which Saviano is now calling a “nonfiction novel,” is an expose of international drug trafficking. But, asserts…
-
Powerhouse Spanish Literary Agent Remembered
The New Yorker has a retrospective on Carmen Balcells, a Spanish literary agent who brought writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges to international fame. Balcells passed away last week at the age of 85. Balcells…
-
Junot Diaz Talks Reading, Books, and Race
In a short interview with the Los Angeles Times, Junot Diaz discusses how he chooses what works to read at events, some books he’s reading now and loving, and America’s uncanny ability to erase racial struggle from its collective mind:…
-
Portrait of a Writing Center
Over at Lit Hub, Michele Filgate is writing a series of articles on six of the country’s top writing centers, starting with GrubStreet in Boston. Rather than competing with MFA programs for students, GrubStreet Executive Director Eve Bridburg sees writing centers…
-
Are Changes Coming to Google Play Books?
Oyster is a digital ebook subscription service that operates much like Netflix. If you think that’s a cool idea, you’ll have to try an alternative—like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program—because Oyster is closing shop. Many of the company’s top execs are headed…
-
Language as Passive-Aggression
At the Atlantic, Megan Garber proposes a new word to describe words and phrases that have come to mean their opposite, like “honestly,” “no offense,” and “literally”: So here’s one proposal: Let’s call these words “smarmonyms.” Because they’re the words that exist because…