The Morning News Tournament of Books has commenced. In the opening round, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks faces off against Ariel Schrag’s Adam (and wins).
Now that James Patterson has finished giving away a million dollars to independent bookstores around the country, he’s moving on to libraries. He has plans to distribute $1.25 million. Applications for the grant ask for a 200-300 statement of what the recipient would do with the money, and are due May 31 of this year. (Is it petty of us to suggest that $1.25 million won’t be that much when split among numerous libraries?)
David Firestone is to be managing editor of FiveThirtyEight. He recently took a buyout from the New York Times after working there for twenty-one years.
The Times has launched an Instagram account, which you can find @nytimes, as part of its strategy to become more social-media savvy.
Kazuo Ishiguro is “on the side of the pixies and dragons,” he said, in response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s recent suggestion that he, well, wasn’t. At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel reminds us that in this latest iteration of the genre wars the terms we’re using mean different things to different people: “Part of the problem is that both the genre and literary worlds have incoherent and contradictory definitions of the words ‘genre’ and ‘literary.’ This often leads to a pointless game of appropriation, where literary critics and readers say that the best genre writers have ‘transcended genre’ and should count as literary fiction, while, at the same time, genre fans declare that famous literary writers belong to genres they never considered themselves a part of. Raymond Chandler is ‘really’ literary fiction while Italo Calvino is ‘actually’ fantasy.”
China is sending a large delegation of writers, publishers, and government officials to BookExpoAmerica in May. The country will be considered a guest of honor at the conference’s Global Market Forum.