A bestselling thriller writer slash marketing executive sits down to crunch the numbers on Lena Dunham’s $3.7 million book advance, and concludes that in terms of how much Dunham might actually earn, the deal is not as crazy as it’s been made out to be.
“Underwear is definitely pants.” So starts novelist Alexander Chee’s “21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves (and How They Can Stop Lying to Themselves and Become Awesome!)
Here is a map of the world adjusted to the size of book publishing markets.
At the New York Times Opinionator blog, Catherine Chung reflects on being labeled a “Brooklyn writer to look out for” while living in Manhattan.
Following a public outcry, the University of Missouri announced this week that it will not be closing the University of Missouri Press, and moreover, that it will reinstate the Press’s former editor-in-chief, Clair Willcox.
Universities that participated in a massive book-digitization project with Google are protected under fair-use laws, a New York judge ruled this week. The suit, which was brought by the Authors’ Guild and several other writers’ guilds, had accused universities of copyright infringement for allowing Google to scan books in their libraries without rights holders’ permission. The deal was struck in 2005, and since then more than 10 million volumes have been scanned.
Emir Kusturica, the former Yugoslavia’s most famous director, is currently undertaking one of his most ambitious projects yet—and it’s not a film. After visiting the Bosnian city of Visegrad, the setting of Serbian novelist Ivo Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina, Kusturica became obsessed with building “a town within a town” around that 16th-century bridge. When the town is completed, Kusturica told the Guardian, the town will have roughly fifty buildings, including “an Ottoman caravanserai, an Austro-Hungarian academy of fine arts, an Orthodox church, a bookshop, a new town hall, a hotel, a marina, a helipad and an opera house in which Kusturica plans to stage the premiere of a work he is writing, based on Andric’s masterpiece.” It’s scheduled to be finished in 2014.