I’m an inveterate Dickens fan, so I’m reading Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens right now. The novel’s mystery centers on Dickens’ final unfinished manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which, like all of his novels, was published in serialization before appearing as a book. Serialization was once deader than Mr. Dickens himself, but the Internet [...]
Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Fall is a great time of year for books. It’s the run-up to the holiday season, a time when lots of new titles appear and lots of publishing news is made. So here’s a roundup:
The Huffington Post recently [...]
I’m still mining great information from the panel discussion by small press publishers I attended at the Wisconsin Book Festival. As the discussion got deep into how to find a publisher for your chapbook, policies varied, from accepting unsolicited manuscripts to invitation-only, but all of the publishers the advice quickly turned to a point on [...]
Publishers of all genres now expect, even require, writers to help market their work. When Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman of Verse Wisconsin posed the question, “How do you find an audience?” to the small-press panelists at the Wisconsin Book Festival, Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press kicked off a round of answers specifically directed at [...]
There was a fantastic panel discussion regarding poetry during the Wisconsin Book Festival. Several small-press publishers answered questions posed by Verse Wisconsin co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman. The publishers had a variety of takes on many questions, ranging from how long it should take to get a response on submissions to money and keeping [...]
Invariably, this question comes up at author events, and it came up Saturday at Doug W. Jacobson’s reading and talk about Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II. Doug’s presentation at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I spent the day in Madison, attending several presentations and readings, and [...]
In every recession, magazines we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on the newsstand close their doors forever, victims of the slump in advertising dollars that invariably comes during tough economic times. So with last week’s news of Blender’s demise, just the most recent in a string of magazines that have folded since the economic crisis began, [...]
I’m a huge Dickens fan, and enjoyed Matthew Pearl’s article at Slate magazine on whether the author had a stalker during his 1867 speaking tour of the U.S. Also at Slate this week, more of Meghan O’Rourke’s elegantly written series on grieving, The Long Goodbye. This week’s essay discusses dreaming of the dead, and the [...]
My friend Ingrid sent me a link to this wonderfully strange meditation on writers’ anxiety by Catherynne M. Valente from the November 2008 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. She talks about the anxiety of not yet being published and, once published, the anxiety over whether you’ll be published ever again. Valente is the author of several [...]
Barnes & Noble has announced its Discover prizes, with the top fiction prize going to Gin Phillips’ The Well and the Mine (Hawthorn Books); second prize to Benjamin Taylor’s The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press) and third prize to Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown) Top nonfiction prize went to David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy (Houghton [...]