Macmillan sci-fi imprint Tor/Forge announced this week that all of its e-books will be DRM-free by July, making it the first major publishing house to drop the digital restriction. In effect, this means that any Tor e-book bought on a Kindle will now be readable on an iPad or Sony e-reader or Nook—thus loosening Amazon’s control over the e-books it sells, which are currently only accessible through a Kindle.
At Salon, Jason Farago argues that novels written by straight authors about gay characters, like Herta Muller’s The Hunger Angel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, is a sign that “homosexuality may no longer be the taboo it once was, for writers—and for readers.”
Congratulations to Bookforum contributor Jacob Silverman for winning Jeopardy last night. He’s on again tonight, and we hope he keeps it up…
At Htmlgiant, Lily Hoang asks writers if they’re friends with other writers whose work they don’t respect.
At his new blog “The Audacity of Despair,” The Wire creator and author David Simon explains why he’s “ambivalent” about posting his writings on his website: “Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere… A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright. But journalism, literature, film, music—these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do.”
A Bronx cottage where Edgar Allen Poe lived for years will be awarded this week at the Lucy G. Moses Preservation Awards, known as the “Preservation Oscars.” The house, which Poe owned until his death in 1849, was built in 1812 and is now owned by the Bronx Historical Society.
Here is an in-depth history of Melville House’s “Art of the Novella” series, and of novellas in general in the age of #longform.