DogmaLars Iyer
Lamberto, Lamberto, LambertoGianni Rodari
Just last December, it was the talk of not just the UK but New York when James Daunt, legendary London indie bookseller and currently head of chain retailer Waterstones, publicly attacked Amazon as a “ruthless, money-making devil.” As Ellie Robins reported here on MobyLives, Daunt used…
There was a depressing article in the New York Times over the weekend about the rate at which novelists are expected to churn out books these days: two a year is now standard in some genres (mysteries, thrillers, romance), with maybe a few short stories…
When the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to present an award for fiction last month, independent bookstores were frustrated at the lack of a winner, which would usually give them a sales boost from readers seeking out the year’s big winner (GalleyCat posted a roundup…
Put down the Bret Easton Ellis. A study conducted at Ohio State University indicates that our behaviour can be influenced by the fictional characters we read. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘experience-taking’, an unconscious process in which we identify with characters to the point of…
A point of clarification after yesterday’s post about the decision not to award anybody with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year: it was the Pulitzer Board that decided not to present the fiction award, and not the jury, whose members selected the three nominated…
The Pulitzer Prizes were given out on Monday, with awards going to the Philadelphia Inquirer for public service in journalism, The Stranger‘s Eli Sanders for feature writing, and the late Manning Marable’s biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention for history, among others. For the first time in…
Words was oh such a twitch-tickling problem to the BFG. He knew exactly what words he was wanting to say, but somehow or other they was always getting squiff-squiddled around. And we can only assume that the same was true of Walter “Wally” Saunders, the…
![big oak You are in a dense forest. To the East you can see a clearing. To the West, North, and South the forest continues, however the forest is to [sic] dense in the West and South. >run north woods You continue on [sic] into…](http://mhpbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/oulupo1-100x64.jpg "FRIDAY CHALLENGE: Oulipo-inspired interactive fiction")
big oak You are in a dense forest. To the East you can see a clearing. To the West, North, and South the forest continues, however the forest is to [sic] dense in the West and South. >run north woods You continue on [sic] into…
The paperback of Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake is in bookstores today. The novel has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and praised by The New York Times (which noted that the novel “attests to the power of emotional intimacy to help even…
In the most hilariously excellent insult I’ve seen lately, David Shields has just named Justin Halpern of Shit My Dad Says a more engaging writer than Jonathan Franzen. In an extract from his forthcoming book How Literature Saved My Life published in Little Star Journal,…