At Publishing Perspectives, Chad W. Post reports on why Douglas Rushkoff, who will speak at the Frankfurt Book Fair, moved from Random House to the innovative start-up publisher OR Books: "With the traditional publishing system, there are too many middlemen, and too many people needing to justify their place in the food chain,” he says. “This ends up costing a lot of money, and ultimately costing a lot of time, too.”
Tonight, New York City's prose fetishists and fans of experimental fiction will likely be heading to a talk titled "On the Well-Tempered Sentence," featuring Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, Christine Schutt, and John Haskell.
Although Lorin Stein has done an excellent job invigorating the Paris Review blog, he remains loyal to print. "There's no emotional connection between the reader and the computer screen," he tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The National Book Foundation has announced this year's "5 Under 35," a group of young authors selected by previous National Book Award finalists. The honorees include Tiphanie Yanique, author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony, and Grace Krilanovich, whose new novel is the hard-to-classify The Orange Eats Creeps.
Yesterday, it was widely reported that a thief stole Jonathan Franzen's glasses, grabbing the spectacles right off the author's face during a Monday-evening publication party for Freedom. The perp, who left a ransom note requesting $100,000, was allegedly chased by partygoers, police, and a helicopter, and gave up the specs shortly after the stunt. That's pretty exciting stuff for a book party, but don't take it too seriously: Our sources in London have told us to take the whole story with a "shovelful of salt."
