Margaret Atwood’s debut opera, Pauline, has opened in Vancouver. The libretto describes the life and last days of Pauline Johnson, a Canadian writer of Mohawk and British descent who died in 1913.
Since its publication 43 years ago, Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of the Continent has been an anticolonialist and anticapitalist classic. Recently, the Uruguayan author reflected on the book’s limitations. “Open Veins tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said.
John Wray reflects that working under a pen name has allowed him to be less inhibited as a writer. “John Wray isn’t so different from poor, nebbishy John P. Henderson from Buffalo, New York. He’s just slightly better company—at least when the work is going well. When it isn’t, needless to say, he’s insufferable; but that’s when I remind myself, with a physical rush of relief, that John Wray doesn’t actually exist.”
David Carr of the Times covers Medium, a hybrid blogging platform that doubles as a publisher.
Amazon’s tactics against other publishers are undermining the qualities that made the company successful in the first place, writes Farhad Manjoo: “To win a corporate battle, Amazon is ruining its customer experience”—i.e., “raising prices, removing ordering buttons, lengthening shipping times and monkeying with recommendation algorithms.”