On the Shelf

A cultural news roundup.

Philip Roth is done with reading fiction.

As of this writing, there are 718 poetry apps.

Coups! Cabals! Backstabbing! Drama at the Poetry Society.

“What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who ‘scrape’ content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks.”

The top 10 books of 2011?

Face it: you can’t read everything.

“I found myself thinking about ‘translated’ and ‘foreign’ as two separate things—sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.”

Don’t even bother trying to go to this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival!

And just in time for Independence Day: Plath, Hemingway, Capote and Woolf—in their bathing suits.