J.K. Rowling has accepted damages from a British law firm after one of its lawyers broke a confidentiality agreement and told a friend that Rowling had written a book under the name Robert Galbraith. Upon learning of the pseudonym, the friend tweeted the news to a journalist, outing Rowling and causing Galbraith’s book sales to instantly skyrocket. Rowling was awarded the cost of her legal fees, and the court forced the firm to make a donation to a charity for war veterans.
In the New York Times, Tom Hanks explains why he really, really likes vintage manual typewriters.
At Salon, Michele Filgate argues that for many writers, tweeting and posting on social media is a professional necessity. She then wonders what that means for more conventional forms of literary documentation: “Are tweets and Facebook status updates and Tumblr posts and emails replacing journals and letters? And if so, are we losing something in the process?”
Our favorite Twitter hashtag is currently #OneTweetBookProposals. Samples include “it's like 50 Shades of Gray, but aimed at the 60+ furries demographic” and “disruptive technologies have totally changed publishing, so here's a book about it.”
Over the weekend, the Atlas Review held a marathon reading of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris in Brooklyn that lasted more than eight hours and featured fifty-five readers, including Marina Abramovic, Sasha Frere-Jones, Justin Taylor, Ariana Reines, Lynne Tillman, and Nelly Reifler. We hope somebody will post a video of the event on the internet, but until then, here’s an interview with Atlas Review contributing editor Dolan Morgan.
Caleb Crain talks with the Daily Beast about his debut novel Necessary Errors, and how at age 46 he learned to be a novelist after going “the necessary socialization for the roles of ‘journalist,’ ‘scholar,’ and ‘critic.’”
