Amazon has pulled more than four thousand e-books from its digitial shelves after publishers refused to let the company sell them more cheaply.
J.K. Rowling is breaking into the world of adult fiction. The Harry Potter author announced this week that after a five-year break, she's signed a deal with Little, Brown to publish her next book, which will be targeted for an older audience. The book's title and pub date have not been released.
Writer Will Self has been named a Professor of Contemporary Thought at London's Brunel University. Self will be teaching in the arts and social sciences departments, and plans to introduce himself to the university with lecture on "urban pyschosis" at the end of next month.
Can’t sell your book? Patricia O’Brien—sorry, Kate Alcott—suggests changing your name.
In anticipation of AWP, Tin House provides a field guide to the literary types that will be floating around Chicago next week: While memoirists “favor fleece outerwear and often carry snacks,” “the essayist signals his difference from the memoirist by the appropriation of a blazer.”
While held captive in Berlin during the Second World War, P. G. Wodehouse recorded radio broadcasts for the Nazis. When the war ended, it was these broadcasts (one of which featured the author describing the German army as “a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machine guns”) that prevented his return to England, out of fear that he would be persecuted on charges of treason. For the next twenty years, Wodehouse allies petitioned the British government to let him return. These documents, though ultimately unsuccessful—“He was nothing more than a silly ass!” wrote one unnamed friend—are now declassified and available to be read at the UK National Archives.
A self-published webcomic is behind the most successful creative Kickstarter campaign ever, having raised more than a million dollars over a nine-year fundraiser. The Order of the Stick author and illustrator Rich Burlew began the campaign in 2003 with the hopes of raising the $57,750 needed to keep his comics about the “fantasy adventures of a collection of stick figures in a role-playing game world,” in print. He succeeded: The campaign closed on Tuesday with 14,952 backers and $1,254,120.
Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois, is for sale for $525,000, while the gated home that was built for Thomas Mann in Brentwood, California is rentable for $15,500 a month.
