This Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...morePosts Tagged: The Independent
This Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country.
...moreThis Week In Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Publisher HarperCollins has plans to aid new independent bookstores with a development program in the form of discounts and grants. American Bookstore Association members, a trade organization for independent booksellers, reports continued growth in membership for seven straight years, with more than 1,700 members. The Independent has a list of twelve must-see bookstores from around the world.
...moreExistential Black Magic
Desperate stuff, all about sex. Some fella called Simon de Beaver. It’s called existentialism. The Independent’s John Walsh sat down to interview Sarah Bakewell about At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, her book about the lives, influences, and impact of that wacky French bunch, the Existentialists.
...moreTransvestite Vampire Biker Nuns vs. Birdwatchers
Finally, the 2016 Oddest Book Title of the Year nominees have been announced, and they include captivating titles like Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space: A Consideration of Cult Film and Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers. The Independent has already placed its bets: Jonathan Allan’s Reading From Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus is surely the […]
...moreVisible Only in Literature
From Cinderella and Oliver Twist to Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter, Etan Smallman muses on the paradox of why so many of literature’s most celebrated protagonists are orphans: Many of the most powerful characters in our best-loved stories are orphaned, adopted, fostered, or found. At the same time, many of the most powerless […]
...morePaying Authors to Appear
The British Society of Authors has called on literary festival organizers to pay authors who make appearances at events. The organization is asking that any literary festivals that charge entrance fees pay authors a minimum fee. At present, few events pay, and those that offer an appearance fee typically pay as little as £150, or about […]
...morePublishers Risk Losing Writers
Rude rejection letters could cost publishers the next big author, warns Hannah MacDonald, founder of September Publishing. MacDonald told colleagues at the FutureBook conference that publishers need to be kinder, reports The Independent: Hannah MacDonald said the industry should be more constructive with its criticism and rebuffs, as there is a danger that potential stars […]
...moreFans Leave Behind Notes in Harry Potter Books
Harry Potter fans have been leaving notes in the series’ books for future fans to find. Fan site Mugglenet has been encouraging people to leave the notes and hashtag photos of them with #PotterItForward, reports The Independent.
...moreRead a Book, Get a Free Bus Pass
In Chuj-Napoca, Romania’s second-most populous city, an initiative passed to offer book-reading passengers free bus fare during a week in June. The initiative was started by a local citizen’s suggestion on Facebook in the hopes of encouraging reading on public transportation. The Independent has the story.
...moreA Solitary Figure
For The Independent, Cahal Milmo pens a profile on Marsha Mehran, bestselling author, noted beauty, and adamant recluse. Spending her time between exile and literature, Mehran championed her work—compulsively, mordantly—above all else: What remained for her was her writing, a pursuit which those who knew her were already aware she chased to the exclusion of […]
...moreBuilding Hagrid’s Hut
Killiechassie House, the £1.9 million Scottish estate author J.K. Rowling calls home, will gain a new addition: a circular stone hut similar to the hut that Hagrid resides in at Hogwarts. The summer cottage recently received approval from the local council, on the condition that no tree was harmed in its construction, reports the Independent.
...moreDave Eggers Gets Google-y Eyed
Dave Eggers’s upcoming novel The Circle is about a woman whose life takes a turn for the sinister after she starts work at “the world’s most powerful internet company” with its “towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work,…athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish […]
...morePatrons and Propaganda
Michelangelo had the Medicis; Jackson Pollock had the CIA. It’s true—in order to ensure the US kept up with the Soviet Union culturally and artistically, the CIA funded abstract expressionist art, unbeknownst even to the artists themselves. Read more about Truman, McCarthy, and secret art money at the Independent.
...moreRebel Muses
Famous female literary muses Zelda Fitzgerald, Louise Joyce, and Vivienne Eliot were more than just the apple of their respective husbands’ and fathers’ eye. It turns out they were also hard party-ers of the Jazz Age. “The muse is traditionally a silent, passive figure; a beautiful woman whose beauty alone is enough to inspire artists” […]
...moreArundhati Roy’s Political Writing
What has Arundhati Roy been up to since her 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things? This piece answers that, exploring Roy’s current writings on India’s Maoist rebels. “When her essay about the trip, Walking with the Comrades, first appeared in India last year, Roy was fiercely criticised for humanising these rebels. For […]
...moreTime for a Digital Diet?
Anybody feeling the “encroachment of the buzz,” the multitudinous distractions that prevent us from concentrating on a book? Johann Hari is offering survival tips for these distracting times. “A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent […]
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