CreateSpace has announced the 2013 Amazon “Breakthrough Novel” contest. Any unpublished or self-published work of fiction is eligible. The company will start accepting submissions in January, and winners of the Grand Prize and the First Prize will receive, among other things, “a full publishing contract with Amazon Publishing to market and distribute your Manuscript as a published book.”
On the occasion of the Oxford American’s 79th issue—and the first edited by new EIC Roger Hodge—Dwight Garner reassesses the magazine’s role over the past twenty years and it’s origins as “The New Yorker with a side of hot sauce, a tub of Duke’s mayonnaise, and a bib... The New Yorker in muddy boots rather than penny loafers.”
Nancy Huston has been awarded the 2012 Literary Review’s “Bad Sex” prize for her novel Infrared. For your enjoyment, here’s the passage that earned her the win: “When our bodies unite for the third time we leave all theatres behind. What happens then has as little to do with the libertinage prized by the French (oh the blasphemers, the precious precocious ejaculators, the nasty naughty boys, the cruel fouteurs and fouetteurs) as with the healthy, egalitarian intercourse championed by Americans (who hand out bachelors degrees in G-points, masters in masturbation and Ph.Ds in endorphines)."
Portrait of the economist as a young sci-fi nerd: At the Guardian, Paul Krugman reveals his early love for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and talks about how Asimov’s fiction offers “the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.”
The Millions kicks off its annual “Year in Reading” with entries by Jeffrey Eugenides, Choire Sicha, Emma Straub, and others on the best books they’ve read this year.
Eric Obenauf, one of the materminds at Two Dollar Radio press, has written an elloquent essay about the pleasures of writing (and publishing) outside of New York.
The Supreme Court is about to rule on a case that could make selling used books illegal.
