The New Yorker debuts Strongbox, a secure document-submission system designed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen that lets users anonymously submit documents to the magazine. Chris O’Shea quips that the service is “basically WikiLeaks for pretentious people.”
Pirated versions of Fifty Shades of Gray have become a runaway hit in China. According to the Telegraph, the contraband editions are replicas of Taiwanese versions of the book, and are being printed en masse in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
Despite having a cult following that extends back to eighties babies, Judy Blume is only now having one of her novels adapted for the big screen. Tiger Eyes, her 1981 bestseller about a young woman mourning the death of her father, will be available this summer in select theaters, and on-demand. Blume wrote the screenplay herself, and it was directed by her son Lawrence.
British novelist Howard Jacobson has won his second Wodehouse prize for his comic novel Zoo Time.
Chick-lit is dead, and it’s been replaced by “farm-lit.” As The Atlantic reports: “Thanks to the economy, picket fences and scruffy farm hands have replaced stilettos and cute i-bankers in literature aimed at women.”
Ernest Hemingway lived on and off in Cuba for more than twenty years (between 1939 and 1960) but while he eventually returned to the U.S., the works he wrote during his Cuban period remained on the island. Until now, that is. Thanks to a private American foundation, two thousand of Hemingway’s records have been digitized and sent to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where they will be available to the American public for the first time ever.
