Not a Typical Reading
Also in today’s N.Y. Times is a story about the newspaper reporter Xu Lai, who was stabbed at a recent reading: Mr. Xu was accosted in a restroom by two men who stabbed him in the stomach and then threatened to cut off his hand before fleeing, according to the friends and fellow bloggers who posted the news on the ...
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NEA Back in the Stimulus
It was incredible to run into Jim Sitter (consultant and the only lobbyist in America for literature) late Friday night at AWP and find out that miraculously, the proposed $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts had made it back into the stimulus package. Jim’s usually the man with the bad news . . . and ...
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The Future of BEA
Today’s Publishers Weekly Daily included a pretty big announcement about the future of BookExpo America, which includes some significant changes, and some interesting/disturbing implications. First off, the specific changes: The annual meeting, set for New York May 29-31, will now also be held at New York’s ...
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Machine
Although Danish author Peter Adolphsen has made a name for himself as a formalist for whom economy is a virtue (to date his five novels and short story collections are less than 300 pages combined), “as a reader,” one reviewer writes, “you feel you have covered a huge distance with him.” Drawing comparisons to Borges ...
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E-Reading
Harold Augenbraum’s Reading Ahead blog is always good, but in the wake of Amazon’s Kindle 2.0 announcement, I think his post on flat screen reading is really interesting: One difference between the screen and the printed book is that the former has no depth while the latter has the illusion of depth. When you ...
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Arts Funding and Government Waste
OK, I won’t say anything at all about the government letting us down, or tax cuts vs. real stimulus, but I do want to point out one really sad fact about the nation we live in—looks like the government will spend $62 billion on keeping the F-22 raptor alive (a plane designed during the Cold War and criticized by ...
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Chelsea Green in the Recession
The latest installment in Scott Esposito’s series on how to publish in a recession features Margo Baldwin of Chelsea Green, which just finished its best year ever. Margo’s responses are really interesting—especially her predictions about the future: Scott Esposito: As someone who has been publishing for ...
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