I have a confession to make. I have a dark, horrid secret known only to those close to me. I have a chess addiction. And it goes back a long, long time. Ever since I started playing my grandfather when I was a wee young lad (I never won, and the wise old sage kept […]
Back from an adventure to Powell’s Books in Portland — a veritable mecca of books, a non-corporate sanctuary that is the highlight of any trip to Oregon. I’ll just tell you one book I purchased there — David Mitchell’s “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” Below are a few pictures, but might I say […]
Poets and Writers published their second annual MFA ranking. Not really any surprises — in fact, not one of the top ten programs even shifted a single place. Of course, the folks over at AWP have already panned the rankings quite devastatingly. In addition to those fine critiques, I have a few of my own. Since […]
The shift to electronic submissions for literary journals has reached a tipping point — more than 50% of journals are accepting some form of electronic submission. What this means is that the pressure has shifted off the journals accepting electronic (the pressure of a expanding slush pile), and has shifted to the journals who still […]
WSJ has an article today that says people are reading more than ever — because of e-readers. While some of the article uses dubious facts, such as Amazon's claim that people with e-readers buy more than 3.3 times the books as before (c'mon Amazon, do free books count as "bought"?), the story gets really interesting […]
On August 2nd, I tweeted my condolences to VQR when I learned about the suicide of their Managing Editor, Kevin Morrissey. But now, as more information has been revealed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, it appears that Morrissey had been making complaints to HR about bullying in the workplace by his boss, Ted Genoways. Genoways […]
Remember How Publishers Complained About Kindle's Text-To-Voice-Reading? Well, Apple's iBooks can do the same thing, but there hasn't been nearly as big of an uproar. As David Pogue writes in the New York Times: "Now swipe down the page with two fingers to make the iPhone start reading the book to you, out loud, with a […]
Michel Houellebecq has a new novel coming out in France in September, a month in which apparently 2/3 of new novels are published in France (!). No ETA for the English translation or even an English title (in French, La carte et le territoire, which translates to Map and Territory), but the Independent reports that the […]
Many people have complained that e-readers don’t advertise your taste in books like traditional books do, but a handmade Kindle case might give your fellow subway/bus passenger a general sense of your aesthetics. With a bit of ingenuity, I imagine these could even be reshaped to fit the iPad. Not that the iPad needs any dressing […]
When I was up in Vancouver last week, the city was plastered with signs advertising Douglas Coupland. Except the word attached to his name — Roots — wasn’t a book I was familiar with. Didn’t he just publish Generation A? (another go around at defining a generation, piggybacking on Generation X). But then I figured out […]
