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This American Life retracted its popular episode featuring an excerpt from Mike Daisey's one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs; new brain imaging studies indicate the human mind reacts to fictional characters similar to real-life encounters; Laura Miller reveals how the Hunger Games franchise was launched; and other news.
GalleyCat features a helpful writing tool Kurt Vonnegut used; the famed Strand bookstore in New York City is in the midst of a labor dispute with its employees; an Italian human rights group insists Dante's Divine Comedy is offensive and should be removed from schools; and other news.
Matthew Yglesias discusses the Justice Department's planned antitrust lawsuit concerning the price of e-books; Barry Eisler comes to Amazon's defense; A writer, Everette Hallford, is suing Fox, claiming the new television series Touch is based on his novel Visionary; and other news.
After over two centuries, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will no longer be printed; the Wall Street Journal reports that e-readers are fueling a boom in sales of erotic novels; critic Dwight Garner looks at the life and poetry of Jack Gilbert; and other news.
Author Francesca Lia Block has taken her mortgage difficulties public; Amazon temporarily lifted its nondisclosure agreement so authors could reveal Kindle Single earnings; James Pogue scrutinizes the Southern mythology surrounding Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan; and other news.
A breakdown of the potential antitrust lawsuit aimed at Apple and large publishers; Fifty Shades of Grey, a best-selling erotic novel published by a small press in Australia, launched a seven-figure bidding war among the major publishers; poet Charles Bernstein writes that PennSound has made available over one hundred recordings of 1990s-era readings at the Ear Inn in New York City; and other news.
The New York Times has more on the Justice Department's potential lawsuit against Apple and several publishers over e-book pricing; Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, is the new owner of the venerable magazine the New Republic; Reese Witherspoon has purchased the film rights to Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild; and other news.
The United States Justice Department intends to sue Apple and five of the largest publishers; WNYC features Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection Lunch Poems; the staff blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the work of Víctor Terán, a poet attempting to save his endangered Isthmus Zapotec language; and other news.
To mark the birthday of John Updike, Random House will reissue some of the author's books, and make Updike's entire backlist available as e-books; Richard Russo and Andre Dubus III discuss the difficulties of writing memoir, an audio walking tour of poetry associated with New York City's East Village neighborhood has been created, narrated by Jim Jarmusch; and other news.
Evan Hughes writes of the friendship between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, and the betrayal that resulted in an award-winning novel; the Guardian examines the growing popularity of erotica among women writers; author Darin Strauss weighs The Sopranos against Six Feet Under; and other news.
