Morrissey is at work on a novel and a new album (in that order). In a recent interview, Moz says he’s lost faith in pop music and wants to write instead, claiming that his memoir, Autobiography, “was more successful than any record I’ve ever released.”
Researchers at Emory University have discovered that reading novels exercises the brain. "We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else's shoes in a figurative sense,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns. “Now we're seeing that something may also be happening biologically."
At the Times, OR books publisher Colin Robinson weighs in on the state of publishing today, particularly the worrying trend of the disappearing midlist, “the space where interesting things happen in the book world, where the obscure or the offbeat can spring to prominence, where new writers can make their mark.”
A journalist for Guns & Ammo magazine has been fired for using too much nuance on the topic of gun control.
A gang of extremists in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli has torched a library of rare and ancient reading material, burning some 78,000 books.
George Saunders on genius, irony, and allowing a little bit of light into a story: “How’s life been? It’s been a lot of things, but one thing it’s been predominantly is beautiful, pleasurable. So I want that to have a place at the table that isn’t sentimental or schmaltzy. It’s earned.”
