After a short illness, literary legend Chinua Achebe passed away on Friday at the age of 82. Achebe was the author of more than twenty books, including the classic Things Fall Apart, which is the most read African novel in history, and most recently, his 2012 memior There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra. Achebe was driven out of his native Nigeria during the country's civil war in the sixties, and spent much of his life writing and teaching in the United States.
How much do publishing people make on average? The blog Life in Publishing has taken a poll and the somewhat depressing results are in: on a yearly basis, assistants make $31,693; editors make $44,808; publicists make $39,463; and managers make $53,634.
Scott Indrisek has launched a new literary site, with his cats. It’s called Shit My Cats Read: The Evening Interviews. The first participant is Sam Lipsyte...interviews with Chris Kraus, Rick Moody, Keren Cytter, Ragnar Kjartannson, and others will follow soon.
A new academic study of “mood” words throughout twentieth-century fiction finds that on the whole, books are becoming less emotional.
Investigative wizard and New Yorker staffer David Grann talks with the Awl about one of his more recent obsessions—his Twitter feed.
And speaking of the New Yorker, at the Review Review, writer David Cameron shares his successful attempt to get the magazine to reject a story it had already published.
David Bowie has been known to cite the work of William S. Burroughs as a literary influence, but there’s good reason to believe he found his inspiration for songwriting in the lines of T.S. Eliot.
