- Will Baby Boomers’ vision problems mean the death of the mass market paperback?
- Anthologies on various subjects thought to be of interest to women have become so numerous that some writers in the anthology loop can’t keep track of what they’ve written:
“Remind me again of what I wrote in there?” said the fiction writer Pam Houston, sounding a touch bleary-eyed while speaking by phone from Iowa City (the latest stop on a book tour for her novel Sight Hound), when asked about her essay in Sex and Sensibility. Ms. Houston strained to recall the other essay collections she’d surfaced in recently.
- Christian Lorentzen calls Curtis Sittenfeld’s much-hyped Prep a “pitch-perfect synthesis” of the Northeastern prep school world. Meanwhile, at Slate, Ann Hulbert argues that the narrator fails to address:
what is likely to strike the book’s natural constituency as the obvious question: Why was a nondescript, white, middle-class girl from the Midwest awarded not just one of the top-notch [Northeastern prep] school’s coveted spots, but a fat scholarship, too?
(Second link first seen at Bookslut.)
- In the words of Moby Lives‘ Dennis Johnson: “Diddy wrote diddly” after pocketing a $300k advance. Random House is suing for a refund.
- “Corny Library Pickup Lines, and How Librarians Effectively Shoot Them Down,” plus one.
- Pitchaya Sudbanthad enters the latest verdict in The Morning News’ Tournament of Books.