New York mayoral candidate Christine Quinn's new memoir, With Patience and Fortitude, has sold only about 100 copies in bookstores since it was released on June 11.
Palestinian writers Ali Abukhattab and Samah al-Sheikh have been refused Visas to the UK to participate in a two-week festival celebrating contemporary Arabic art. As part of the second annual Shubbak Festival, the couple were supposed to discuss their writing and literature "in the besieged Gaza Strip" at the ICA in London. Palestinian authorities were vague about the reasons for refusing the visas, telling organizers that the festival did not qualify as official “business.”
You can’t buy an e-book version of Stephen King’s novel Joyland, but thanks to book pirates, you can download an illegal version of it—along with every other Stephen King novel in existence.
San Francisco startup Parakweet has received $2 million in funding to develop BookVibe, a book-recommendation service that bases its suggestions on information drawn from social media. According to its creators, "the system taps into hundreds of millions of organic updates on Twitter, Facebook, and more and identifies certain behaviors like 'intent to read,' 'read,' and 'recommend.' It factors in users’ personal interests, their online behavior, and the interests and affinities of people in their social graph..."
In a curt letter to the New York Times responding to a piece about sexism in the literary arts, Jonathan Franzen states gender imalance is worse in New York's theater world than it is in publishing.
At Publishers Weekly, librarian Peter Brantley has put out a call to Kickstart a new library journal.
The Huffington Post interviews audiobook king Simon Vance, winner of ten Audie Awards and the voice of more than 450 audiobooks. Vance talks preparation (he drinks a concoction of lemon, ginger, cayenne, and honey to ready his voice for reading), his early years at the BBC, and how he decides what a character is going to sound like: “My first anchor will be the information given in the text by the author—Dickens is particularly good at painting the picture of a character, giving me some idea of his/her physical characteristics and social status even before they open their mouth.”
