While her Facebook-founding brother continues to spread the gospel of social media, Randi Zuckerberg is making a name for herself by writing cautionary books about the dangers of living online. Her first book, Dot Complicated, is a “cross between memoir and how-to guide” about navigating the social internet, and her latest effort is a children’s book about “about a young girl called Dot who discovers the fun of playing outside when her mother takes away her tablet, laptop, cellphone, and desktop computer. “
Moby Lives reprints the totally charming form letter Margaret Atwood sends out when declining to blurb a book. Explaining why she no longer blurbs, Atwood writes on her website: “Publishers and writers often send me manuscripts with a request that I read the book and give them a quotable quote to use on the back cover. It takes four to six hours to read the book, and I get 10 or so of these requests a week. Multiply 5 hours times 10 requests and you get a 50-hour a week job.”
The music website Pitchfork is about to launch a magazine-style mobile app called “Pitchfork Weekly.”
On November 15th, a new exhibit on the handwritten works of Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser will open at the Drawing Center in New York. While Walser, the younger of the two, was likely unaware of Dickinson’s work, they had a lot in common: “Walser wrote in tiny, inscrutable script on narrow strips of paper using an antiquated German alphabet that was long considered indecipherable. Similarly, Dickinson fitted her multifarious poetic fragments to carefully torn pieces of envelope or stationery, which were discovered among her posthumous papers.” This is the first time that Dickinson’s manuscripts and Walser’s microscripts will be displayed in a museum.Courtesy of The Toast—with a hat tip to Emily Gould—here are some delightful jokes about male novelists.
Minnesota indie press Graywolf talks to the New York Times about the press’s history, the difficulty of publishing poetry, and what the editors look for in unsolicited manuscripts.