“Is monster erotica lucrative?” New York Magazine talks to two Texas college students who have made more than mid-career accountants and engineers at Boeing by writing adult novels with titles like Taken By the T-Rex and Ravished by the Triceratops.
At the Page Turner blog, Adelle Waldman considers why (and how) novelists fail to adequately address the subject of female beauty.
The new, all digital Newsweek is staffing up, and they’ve already poached some good writers, including Jezebel’s Katie Baker and the New York Times’s Karla Zabludovsky.
Dave Eggers released a statement this week in response to accusations that he plagiarized the conceit of Kate Losse’s memoir The Boy Kings, which detailed her years as an early employee at Facebook. In an email to Gawker, Eggers said, ”I’ve just heard about the claims of Kate Losse that my novel, The Circle, was somehow based on a work of nonfiction she wrote. I want to make it clear that I have never read and have never heard of her book before today. I did not, in fact, read any books about any internet companies, or about the experiences of anyone working at any of these companies, either before or while writing The Circle.”
A new law in France will prevent Amazon.fr from shipping discounted new books to customers for free. The regulation is an amendment to a 1981 law that mandates that all new books must be sold at a fixed price.
Once again, Jonathan Franzen is railing against social media. This week, Franzen returned to his favorite topic during a BBC radio interview, describing social media as a “coercive development.” He remarked, “What I find particularly alarming from the point of view of American fiction is that... agents will now tell young writers: 'I won't even look at your manuscript if you don't have 250 followers on Twitter.’" Franzen added, "I see people who ought to be spending their time developing their craft, and people who used to be able to make a living as freelance writers, I see them making nothing and coerced into this constant self-promotion."
