Young-adult novelist Lauren Myracle has agreed to withdraw her book Shine from the shortlist of National Book Award finalists in keeping with the board’s request. Myracle says she was asked to do so to “preserve the integrity of the award and the judges' work.” Soon after the five finalists in the young-adult-fiction category were announced last week, a sixth book, Chime by Franny Billingsley, was added. The National Book Foundation hasn’t said that they got the titles mixed up, but they did apologize for the mistake.
Looking into how could a single author could have written or edited more than 100,000 books, Pagan Kennedy investigates the rise of “robot-books”: “software programs—robots, if you will—that can gather text and organize it into a book.”
Bookstore sales rose nearly twelve percent in August! (But possibly because Borders went out of business.)
The online petition Occupy Writers—which currently has more than eight hundred members—is now publishing literary dispatches from the Wall Street occupation. Participating writers are asked to submit “a paragraph, a poem, a comic, a story, a vignette, anything goes.”
Reviews by David Shields and Ben Ehrenreich, and essays on Glenn Beck’s novels, literary tattoos, and Buster Keaton round out the first edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books e-book.
Britain prepares for the midnight release of Murakami’s opus 1Q84.
