How are Goodreads users reacting to news of the forthcoming takeover by Amazon? Not well, says Rob Spillman at Salon: “On the Goodreads Facebook page, sentiment about the acquisition is running 10-to-one against it. Many members felt proprietary about the site and posted with surprising venom that they felt betrayed and were going to delete their accounts. A typical response: ‘You screwed us over. Take your money and run. You know the site you worked so hard on’ will be corrupted by Amazon.”
At the Awl, Jim Behrle has some practical advice for aspiring writers: “The Creative Writing Industry has failed the American Writer by a) not teaching them how to write bestsellers and b) not really preparing them for the life writers really have to live, the things they actually will have to do to get their work ‘out there.’"
Faulkner’s Nobel Prize, as well as several of his lost stories, hand-corrected manuscripts and letters are headed to Sotheby’s for auction in June.
The seventh annual New York Anarchist Book Fair kicks off next weekend.
Thomas Pynchon’s novel V turns fifty this month. At Page Turner, Alexander Nazaryan considers the similarities between the 1963 novel and Pynchon’s forthcoming book, Bleeding Edge, which takes place in “the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11.”
Andrew Motion, England’s former Poet Laureate, is calling on the government to heavily tax second homes in order to preserve local communities and “make owning a second home difficult for all but the very wealthy.”
