paper trail

Mar 9, 2012 @ 04:00:00 pm

Patrick DeWitt

The National Book Critics Circle presented its awards for the best books of 2011 at a ceremony in Manhattan last night. The fiction prize went to Edith Pearlman for her short story collection Binocular Vision; Maya Jasanoff won in the nonfiction category for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World; Laura Kasischke won in poetry for Space, in Chains; John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan won best biography; autobiography went to Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace; and the award for criticism went to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews.

In honor of National Proofreading Day (which was Wednesday, did you celebrate?) GalleyCat is directing readers to EditMinion, a robotic copy editor that spots mistakes in emails. But if you’re the kind of person who enjoys enforcing the finer points of grammar without the help of a computer, we recommend Ed Park’s meditation on the Chicago Manual of Style.

How low can e-books go? Google is currently selling Michael Lewis’s Boomerang for $3.99. Not to be outdone, Amazon is matching the price.

Jim Romenesko looks into why the redesigned Chicago Reader website looks like, in the words of NYTimes digital design director Ian Adelman, "a crappy version of the nymag.com & vulture.com sites."

Tonight at BookCourt, Patrick DeWitt reads from his novel The Sisters Brothers.

The Rumpus's Elissa Bassist exhorts women to "join the girls' club," and disrupt the gender disparity in writing and publishing.