At The New Republic, owner Chris Hughes explains why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted to buy the Washington Post, and speculates about what the purchase might mean for the newspaper: “My bet is that the traditional outlets will assimilate some of the business style of their new owners, but the substance of their journalism will remain grounded in their best traditions.”
Slate’s Dan Kois attempts to read 23 mass-market paperbacks over a week at the beach. Starting with John Gardner’s Grendel, “the first literary novel [he] ever became obsessed with,” Kois is reading everything from genre novels to memoirs to short stories to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels.
Orhan Pamuk talks with Pankaj Mishra about the protests in Taksim Square, ideology in Turkey, and why TV is replacing the novel.
At the New Inquiry, Tom Cutterham considers what depictions of autism in fiction can reveal about subjectivity in novels.
A new report about book-buying trends finds that women buy more books than men, and that consumers in general are buying more e-books. The Bowker report also found that online booksellers now account for 44 percent of all sales, women buy 58 percent of all books, and e-books make up 11 percent of all book sales—up from 7 percent the year before.
Crime writer Elmore Leonard has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. The 87-year-old writer is currently convalescing at a hospital in Detroit, and according to his researcher, "he's doing better every day.” Before the stroke, Leonard had been working on his 46th novel.
