Writing Dies Again
For the LA Times, David L. Ulin responds to Tom McCarthy’s Guardian article on “the death of writing.”
...morePosts Tagged: Jacket Copy
Little Free Library Battle: 9-Year-Old vs. City Council
In Leawood, KS, a 9-year-old was forced to remove the Little Free Library he built in his family’s front yard because it’s considered an “illegal detached structure.” After he takes the issue to the city council next month, he may be allowed to return the library to its original location, but in the meantime he […]
...moreThe Amazon War: A Rumpus Roundup
Amazon and Hachette Book Group have been locked in an epic battle over e-book pricing since early May. Amazon began by delaying shipments of Hachette books and then escalated to removing Hachette titles from the site entirely. The leader of this rebellion is Hachette executive Michael Pietsch, once responsible for discovering and editing a little book titled […]
...moreFool Me Once
April Fools’ Day provides the opportunity for a little bit of old fashioned fun. Jacket Copy has a rundown of some of yesterday’s literary pranks from across the pond.
...moreNational Poetry Month
April Fools and the beginning of National Poetry Month? Seems like a killer day to us! [April 1] marks the start of National Poetry Month, the monthlong celebration of the verse inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. The April initiative aims to highlight the legacy and achievements of America’s poets, and is among […]
...moreTahereh Mafi Interview
Jacket Copy spoke with Tahereh Mafi about Shatter Me, the first book in her young-adult trilogy. Mafi discusses how the idea for the main character’s “girl-with-the-lethal-touch” idea arose and whether there are similarities between the character and herself: “She kills people when she touches them. So that’s a huge difference between the two of us. […]
...moreUnbanned Books
“Tables were piled high with once-banned books as political hopefuls, returning expats and intellectuals gathered to celebrate the unbanning.” On Monday, Libya celebrated the removal of censorship laws with a ceremony at the Royal Palace in Tripoli. Unbanned books included Arablic translated versions of “The Secret Life of Saddam Hussein,” “The CIA Files of Arab […]
...moreElissa Shappnell Interview
“That was when I knew what I wanted to do was create these archetypal female characters — the slut, the good girl, the bad mother, the party girl, all these women we think we know — and subvert the reader’s expectations of who they were. I wanted each story to in some way confront what […]
...more“The Phantom Tollbooth” Anniversary
“Juster was an architect who’d written a book that didn’t fit the mold of children’s books at the time — its puns were too sophisticated, the vocabulary was too difficult, and there was that whiff of political metaphor. What’s more, Juster was told “fantasy was bad for children because it disorients them,” he said.” Yesterday […]
...moreNovelists and NASA
The publisher Tor/Forge and NASA will collaborate on the creation of “science-based science fiction.” The budding relationship will allow writers to consult scientists about the facts behind their stories. “GSFC’s Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP) Office will host a select group of Tor/Forge authors — some of whom already write science based fiction — to learn […]
...moreTraffic Reads
What more appropriate list could possibly come out of LA than books to read during gridlock? Especially an LA impending traffic crisis? This Friday marks Carmaggedon, which is the kind of catastrophe you know about ahead of time, specifically one in which “all lanes and ramps of the northbound 405 Freeway, along the 10-mile section […]
...moreWork In Progress
As a reader, I love this. As a writer, I am terrified. Via the always excellent Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is creating a new web site, FSG Work In Progress, that presents conversations with authors while their books are still being written. It also has some fascinating looks inside other […]
...moreJune is Novella Month
How’s this for a definition of novella: “a novella, I think, looks through the narrow lens of a short story, and with a short story’s intense focus, at a small, precise part of the world, but it treats what’s within that lens with a novel’s generosity and care.” Jacket Copy talks about novella-writing month. Which happens […]
...moreHappy to Be Called Horror
“JC: Though the book also has elements of horror, like Stephen King, it reads very differently than a Stephen King novel. Do you consider it in the horror genre? “VLV: It’s my great hope that this book will be considered a horror novel! Sometimes reviewers and readers have been resistant to offer the label, maybe […]
...moreAre Printed Literary Journals Imperiled?
“For me, if there’s a piece of writing that I care about, I want to have the physical object,” says Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space. “There’s a permanence to it, a different kind of permanence than if you find it on a website. You’re bringing together these different voices and […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Blog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it. Eggers on Salinger. Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via) “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!” Jacket Copy has fun with illustrators’ pictures of their favorite literary figures and characters. “If […]
...moreStaying Alive as a Poet, Artist, Etc.
“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.” Jacket Copy last week pondered the unfortunate tendency towards suicide, especially among poets, and why you are not […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
With the year winding down, the book blogs have been ablaze with your typical speculations about the best of this and that. But perhaps there are less obvious threads out there if we only knew where to look. . . The New York Times retraces the fictional haunts of Patricia Highsmith, our ‘most Freudian’ of […]
...moreWhat Happens When Literary Journals Report The News?
With newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before because they tried to make their articles all “literary.” Take that, 5 W’s.
...moreStuds Terkel And The FBI
“In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy — maybe if he’d gotten the job, we would have had “CSI: Studs Terkel.” But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that would last for more than four decades.” At Jacket Copy, Carolynn Kellogg reports that the […]
...more“The Sexualization of Violence” and Comic-Con
There’s no easier way to recruit a legion of mortal enemies than to say something unflattering about the culture of comic books, but I’ve decided that I have nothing to lose today. Well, maybe I have something to lose, because I’m going to hide behind a quote from Tod Goldberg over at Jacket Copy. Goldberg […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are obsessed. They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both authors and look forward to reading both books, but this week, the blogs talked so incessantly about them that I will make this roundup a […]
...moreThe Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
And I’m back! Thanks very much to Michael Berger for filling in for me while I was gone! He did a damn fine job. Lots has happened over the last few weeks:
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