February 2012
14 posts
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discoverynews:
annadevries:
Public Service Announcement: Literary Magazines still exist! And they are “offbeat,” “itty bitty,” and “platform-agnostic.”
Check these out.
(Thanks, NYT!)
This is so 90s. Love
If they could only bring back “Sassy,” our life would be complete.
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Amazon, Up in Flames - NYTimes.com →
Another day, another article about how the publishing industry hates Amazon.
The situation is not quite as dire as the article makes it seem. Everyone is trying to sell and promote books, the devil is in the details.
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Great Scott! Fitzgerald is enjoying a third act |... →
We approve of this.
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“I’ve been fortunate that all the bad reviews I’ve had have been written by...”
– Geoff Dyer, re: the newly established Hatchet Job prize for most scathing book review.
(via)
This is a view we hear a lot in our hallways.
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Hemingway highlights himself
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The Millions' Guide to Litifying Your Tumblr... →
Glad to see we are “bookish” and contain “miscellany.” We love miscellany.
See our previous post if you want to know our feelings on publishing & Tumblr.
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Publishing, the Internet, and Tumblr
“The static web is dying so fast,” said [Josh John] Green, who thinks within a year or two social media will dominate the Internet. “Tumblr is way better than all of the other ones,” he said.
Instead of trying to sell his latest book with social media, Green said he uses social media to build a community. “I included my community in the process,” he...
“There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, “On Death, without Exaggeration”
1923-2012
(via annadevries)
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January 2012
23 posts
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“Ah, good conversation - there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of...”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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“Each time you happen to me all over again. ”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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“You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive...”
– Edith Wharton, “New Year’s Day” in Old New York
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“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is...”
– Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
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Happy Birthday to Edith Wharton, First Lady of...
Today is the 150th Anniversary of Wharton’s birth (that’s 1862, English majors).
She was employed by Scribner’s Magazine to report on World War I, and was one of the few foreigners allowed to travel through France to the front lines.
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, for The Age of Innocence, in 1921.
She is buried in the American Cemetery, in...
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“I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.”
– Henry James, after a request by the Times Literary Supplement to cut three lines from a 5,000 word article (via annadevries)
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Check it out
Your humble ScribnerBooks tumblr-er has a Tumblr:
http://annadevries.tumblr.com/
More reading, writing, publishing, editing, and miscellany. (Star Wars dogs, for example.)
Same great taste, less commercial filling.
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Some of my worst friends are books
“A book is not company. We engage with it, argue with it, carry it around in our pockets and minds, are haunted by memories of it for years. But it doesn’t argue back, doesn’t engage, never inquires how our day has been, gives only what it wishes. Books are selfish. Everything, every word, is on their terms.
That’s what I like about them.”
—Rick Gekoski,...
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Apostrophe Protection Society
Did you know one exists? They are currently standing up for what’s right in the latest grammar debacle that is Waterstones.
(Even our spell check is vociferously protesting that word.)
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The Planet Hoth is a real place
…and it’s in Finse, Norway, where George Lucas and company decamped to film the scenes from The Empire Strikes Back
It’s also the setting for 1222, Anne Holt’s locked-room mystery featuring a quirky cast of characters trapped in a hotel with a killer during a raging blizzard. Unfortunately, no tauntauns make an appearance.
(Any chance we get to link our books with...
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Thinking About Stephen King
“No one is better at prying open the ordinary reality of evil, the way our nightmares emerge from our daily experience, from our fears and our frustrations, our envy and our rage….King, at his best, affects us: by revealing the deepest — and yes, the darkest — aspects of ourselves.”
—David Ulin, a terrific literary critic, casts his eye on King’s...
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Apropos of nothing: Our current internet obsession
Jenny Holzer is an artist who creates huge installations of “truisms” - statements such as “Money Creates Taste” —and projects them onto the side of buildings. Someone has taken this idea and imitated it - as if Jenny Holzer were talking to her kids. The result is book-worthy: http://twitter.com/JennyHolzerMom
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“An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college...”
– From the department of New York Times corrections, December 30th, 2011. Even better, a self described “adolescent with Asperger’s” pointed the mistake out, initially, in the comments. (via elisabethdonnelly)
We applaud the attention to detail here, folks. (As would our author, David Finch.)
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Yelping with Cormac: Chipotle Mexican Grill →
bobbyfinger:
yelpingwithcormac:
SOMA - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a...
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A "goofy" Scandinavian thriller?
“So you see what we have here. There’s no reason to make the doctor be a dwarf or to send snuff dribbling down Geir’s chin. It’s just for the fun of it. Scandinavian thrillers are all the rage now, starting, I guess, with Smilla’s Sense of Snow. It must be spooky in Scandinavia, but Holt, Norway’s best-selling female crime writer and a former minister of justice, has a goofy streak ...
December 2011
18 posts
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5 Books You Can't Download
Because they’re not available as an e-book, and won’t be, for the foreseeable future.
[via]
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6. The Read A Book Guy. “Not one of these movies is as good as reading a book.” On a list of books, by the way, he will say none of the books is as good as books used to be. He also hates Kindles, which he may or may not mention.
from The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet in the Comments Sections of Year-End Lists on NPR.org
We applaud this guy and his own special brand of...
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Shakespeare & Co. owner dies
“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.” -George Whitman
The original “independent bookstore.”
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We love Jeffrey Eugenides' mom
I attended a reading of Toibin’s in Princeton, and when I mentioned that I was going to give the stories to my mother, he warned me not to: too much explicit gay sex, apparently. Well, that’s true about a couple of stories here, but I think my mother could have handled it, if only because she’s a good reader, knows what art is, and would have enjoyed the range of subjects and lives treated...
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Go see this movie
A brilliant movie with career-cementing performances by Charlize Theron and our own Patton Oswalt. (Yes, we’re claiming him.) Scribner saw a special screening several weeks ago (Thanks, Patton!) and can vouch that this is a provocative, unflinching film with terrific performances.
As A.O. Scott says in his rave review,
“Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar...