#litblog

Litblog Roundup 2014-10-20

The weekly liblog roundup features the latest highlights from the world of literary blogs. If you spend as much time reading litblogs as I do, there are two things you see frequently: obituaries and awards announcements. I’ll skip the obituaries.

Awards

After last week’s announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (an award Sartre rejected), this week there are more award announcements. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded each year for new novels published in English, in the UK. The 2014 Man Booker Prize was awarded to Australian novelist Richard Flanagan. Also the finalists have been announced for the National Book Award in the U.S. and Penn Sound Daily has recordings of some of the nominated poets. Khadijah Queen is the 2014 Winner of The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers.

Bad Review Plus Stalking Equals Fail

Andy Warhol once said, “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches”. Well, nobody gave that advice to Kathleen Hale. Thanks to the Internet, now you can have an ass write a review of your book on any number of websites. That’s not news. What’s news is that eventually the odds would have it: such an ass would review a book, written by an ass, resulting in a flamewar, or worse, a stalking situation.

The Elements of New Style?

This isn’t really from a “ltblog” exactly, and I’m still deciding which sources to rely on for this roundup, but anyway… The New York Times Sunday Book Review describes a new book by a Harvard linguist The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. It looks like a useful book, especially for anyone whose writing education (mine) had a hole in it big enough to fit the entire second half of the 20th Century.

McSweeney's

McSweeney’s Publishing is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers and headquartered in San Francisco. McSweeney’s was named the country’s seventh most innovative media company for 2012, just behind Reddit. Now, McSweeney’s has announced its intent to become a nonprofit organization.

Miscellany

I don’t always have to have a whole paragraph and a cute sub-title, do I?

A new language has been discovered.

What’s it like to lead a poetry workshop?.

The American Library Association warns that Adobe’s E-books might not be private. Similarly, the ALA has warned against other potential threats to the free exchange of information, such as the PATRIOT ACT.

Reedsy is yet another addition to the large and growing set of web applications for writers, readers and publishers. Many of them fail, though.

In the wake of last week’s announcement of the meltdown of HTMLgiant, Adam Robinson looks back at the early days of litblogs, the rise of web-connected self-published writer, and the question of community with his post Self-Publishing Question.