Amazon Publishing has acquired a ten-year North American license to publish all of the books in Ian Flemming’s “James Bond” series.
If you Google the words “About the Author,” Thomas L. Friedman’s biography comes up. At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal investigates why, and finds that it isn’t a search-engine optimization trick. It turns out that Friedman’s biography actually is the internet’s most linked-to author page—likely from as many detractors as from admirers. (The second result is John Colapinto’s clever 2001 novel of stolen identity, About the Author).
Michael Cunningham, one of this year’s Pulitzer jurors, weighs in on the failure to give an award to a work of fiction this year: “There’s something amiss.”
So you’re a novelist, and you need a blurb for your new book? In a New Yorker humor piece, bestselling author Adam Mansbach (of Go the Fk to Sleep fame) says he’s happy to oblige—for a price.
Charles Simic considers the horror of what happens when there’s nothing—or at least nothing good—to read in the bathroom.
The Charlie Rose special on Christopher Hitchens—which features a roundtable with Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and others—is now online.
The author is not only dead, she’s now been replaced by Wikipedia. Gawker flags a sad new trend in publishing, exemplified most recently by, ahem, a book called Celebrities With Big Dicks. This trend is the Wiki-anthology—books made up exclusively of Wikipedia articles. The title in question—which includes more than two dozen articles on Jay-Z, Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell, among others—is published by the South Carolina-based company BiblioLabs, whose internet arm, Project Webster, “uses human curators to assemble Wikipedia content into new works."
What did it cost Patti Smith, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, and five other women writers to make it in New York? The Awl crunches the numbers.
