May 10, 2013 On the Shelf Celebrity Publishing, and Other News By Sadie Stein “I waited until my first book was published to learn the genre, and when Oprah announced ‘It’s literary fiction!’ just seconds after my pub date, I was overcome with joy.” At McSweeney’s, Jessica Francis Kane tries to make the Genre Reveal Party happen. Stewart Brand, the human proto-Internet. Viggo Mortensen, Johnny Depp, and 50 Cent: just three of the celebrity publishers on the scene. Short fiction, annotated. “Around the time we had our first home computer, my dad started to keep track of all of the books that he read in an Excel Spreadsheet. He kept his spreadsheet up to date for almost twenty years, and he’d accumulated 10,496 books before his death. My dad rated his books on a 1-10 scale, but his average score floated around 7.5/10, so I think he generally enjoyed most of what he read.” A tribute to a devoted reader.
May 9, 2013 On the Shelf Under Covers, and Other News By Sadie Stein Iconic book covers and their (often less-than-iconic) adaptation posters. Speaking of: children’s books that (arguably) should never have been filmed. The stories behind classic book titles. The New York Times points up the growing trend of poets laureate around the country. An author calls for an end to gendered book covers and issues a challenge, with excellent results.
May 8, 2013 On the Shelf Fun with Word Frequency, and Other News By Sadie Stein See how many times a word or phrase is used in a book! Hours of … okay, maybe not fun, but hours. New research suggests that there exists a family of “ultraconserved words”—including ashes, man, worm, and not—that have survived, virtually unchanged, for fifteen thousand years. Amanda Knox tells the Times what she reads. Among others: Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Foster Wallace. The Harper Lee copyright fracas inspires a list of literary lawsuits. “I’ve been getting death threats.” Charlaine Harris on the end of Sookie Stackhouse.
May 7, 2013 On the Shelf Wild and Crazy Libraries, and Other News By Sadie Stein “It is definitely not your mother’s Donnell,” says the New York Times, ominously, of the new plans for the Fifty-Third Street branch of the New York Public Library. Famously reclusive eighty-seven-year-old national treasure Harper Lee is suing literary agent Samuel Pinkus over the copyright for To Kill a Mockingbird. Says Lee’s lawyer, “Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see … Harper Lee had no idea she had assigned her copyright.” The new Goodreads archnemesis (our word), Riffle, is live. Martin Amis apparently “views the Brooklyn hipster scene as populated by conventional posers.” If fictional mothers wrote hypothetical parenting books—because why not?
May 6, 2013 On the Shelf Hemingway Moves North, and Other News By Sadie Stein More than two thousand papers and other materials from Ernest Hemingway’s Havana estate, Finca Vigia, are being transferred to the John F. Kennedy Library. Everything you did not know about the Desmond Elliott Prize, which is a prize. William S. Burroughs’s daily routine: methadone, lemonade, knife-throwing. One hundred academics write an open letter to the British education secretary; get taken to task for bad grammar. Taschen wants to corner the market on “big, collectible books.” (The formal industry term.)
May 3, 2013 On the Shelf Anne Brontë Gets a Headstone, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anne Brontë finally gets an accurate headstone. (The original misstated her age.) “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” Claire Messud bristles at the notion that characters should be likable. The Atlantic is launching a line of e-books. HBO gives Olive Kitteridge the miniseries treatment. In other film news, can you distinguish an Atwood novel from a Hollywood thriller?