Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Gabe for getting a free copy of Erased by Jim Krusoe.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker. Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present twenty-two depictions of the new Russia from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time. Translators include Nick Allen, Keith Gessen, Anna Gunin, Ellen Litman, and others. The work in this anthology reminds us that Russia’s greatest commodity and its greatest contribution to the world has not been oil and gas and armaments. Rather, it’s been the successive generations of Russian writers capable of examining life in all its emotional and intellectual restlessness, in all its complexity and intensity.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.  Read more »

I have a “like/apathetic” relationship with books on tape, short story podcasts, etc (my feelings about them aren’t quite strong enough to reach the “love/hate” stage). I’m fond of listening to short stories read by their authors, or those accompanying an interesting discussion/analysis. I’m not fond of listening to short stories read by people who mumble, or by people who so overact that you end up paying more attention to the acting and less to the actual words.

But even if the book on tape/podcast/etc is perfectly put together, and even if I can get myself to focus enough so as to keep up with the story, for me, the aural short story just can’t compete with the physical and cognitive experience of holding a book in your hands and seeing the words on paper.

The fact that I (and I’m guessing, many other people as well) tend to prefer reading text than listening to it is somewhat ironic, seeing as it’s the oral tradition that came first. Then again, the stories told thousands of years ago are pretty different from today’s stories, aren’t they? Compared to the epic tales of yesteryear told by master storytellers, many of today’s short stories are big on prose and nuance, which I don’t think translate quite as well to the oral form.

Which is not to say today’s stories are not worth listening to. Read more »

Now that the first season of MTV’s Jersey Shore is over, the cast members will have some free time on their hands. The following is a list of book recommendations for the guidos and guidettes to digest in between their gelling, juicing, and tanning.

Read more »

Ernest Hemingway's 1918 passport photo

Passport photos of famous artists, via The Rumpus.

Was Shakespeare actually a woman?

Over at The Millions, a book pirate bares all.

Literary cartography, via Silliman’s Blog.

The top 20 most annoying book reviewer cliches, and how to use them all in one meaningless review, via Eimear Ryan.

Is there such a thing as a “typical” New Yorker short story?

Dictionaries have been banned from southern California schools after a parent’s complaint over a “sexually graphic” definition.

Is it possible to accurately rank writing programs?

And to get you through the hump day, here is a video of Ninja Turtles stealing pizzas: Read more »

In news that isn’t really news, today’s artists are having a hard time making a living. And when they do make a living, they probably aren’t working on their art.

For the majority of us who majored in something that made our parents shift uncomfortably in their seats – or worse yet, acquired a graduate degree in that field, the reality of every day life is indeed a heavy one. Most of us won’t be discovered at an early age and catapulted to fame before we can mentally or emotionally handle it. Hell, most of us won’t even see the first letter in the word fame. But what we will see: bills, long hours at sucky jobs, and more reports about how today’s artists are having a hard time making a living.

I know plenty of talented writers who have settled into lives of little consequence (teaching, working 40 hours a week as editors and proofreaders, transcribing Japanese manuals into English…) because they got too damn tired of walking the poverty line. They fought the good fight as long as they could, but time eventually claimed its victory. They no longer cared if their masterpiece was ever published or garnered lavish acclaim, they just wanted to buy groceries without coupons and own a DVR. Read more »

Laura Miller’s piece in Salon last week touched upon our continued interest in reinventing Jane Austen into what most pleases ourselves. Given the ridiculous success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and multiple vampire books*, there’s been much talk about whether Jane Austen herself would be rolling in her grave, or perhaps amused to see her stories with “ultra violent zombie mayhem.”

I can’t help but wonder though, if we’ve unconsciously brought Jane Austen full-circle. Though Austen never wrote about zombies, her juvenilia is full of scandal — carriage chases, divorce, murder and other mayhem, without always punishing the offending character. (Though this may not sound very scandalous to us, but in Victorian England this was extremely shocking, and to protect her reputation, Austen’s juvenilia was not published by the family until over 100 years later.)

But much like the spirit behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s humor is tongue-in-cheek, and at 14 she’s already noticed the inordinate number of women who faint in the novels of her time. In Love and Freindship[sic], written when Austen was still a teenager, she writes, Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Traci for getting a free copy of From Away by David Carkeet.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Erased by Jim Krusoe. In Erased, Theodore Bellefontaine, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business, receives a postcard from his dead mother. “I need to see you,” the first card reads. At first, Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second, even more urgent card, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. Aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan’s Samaritans, an all-girl bikers club, he searches for clues within the worlds of women’s clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing. Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe’s trilogy about resurrection.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.  Read more »

Does it matter to you who's behind the pen?

I spent a lot of time on the couch and in front of the TV this past week and not because I’m unemployed (as was the case not so long ago).  A week into being a happy working person again, I catch some mystery thing that “could be meningitis, could be the swine flu, or maybe pneumonia” (thanks, Doc – lots of help).  As I struggled to recover what turned out to be one major asskicker of a flu, my stiff neck always managed to keep the remote just out of reach and I caught a helluva lot of commercials.  Now, it’s been some time since I’ve viewed TV commercials in their natural form (despite my love for the ad world) – like most, I only ever see them because I had to catch something on Hulu or needed to YouTube an ad that was actually hilarious and needed to be watched again.

It’s not a secret or even a great observation to say that advertisers and marketers have borrowed from the art industry.  Billboards, print ads, et cetera – that’s photography and graphic arts – things we can easily still call art in its most commercial form.  Jingles are (let’s not forget) the work of a composer and maybe even a lyricist.  And what about the snazzy slogans and zingy one-liners? Writing good copy takes a true talent with words – encompassing a product or service’s purpose and core in a single sentence is not an easy task.

So if advertising has already “taken” photography and fine arts from the art industry, is it that strange that poetry would one day find itself lurking in the ad world’s dark, dirty cells? Read more »

"The Da Vinci Code" actually translates to "The Of Vinci Code." Which makes no sense. Score one for Dan Brown.

Because they’re just as useful, if not more so, than good books in learning how to write well. See also: How To Write Badly Well.

Because, even if you can’t actually learn anything about writing from them, they can still be a boon to your self-esteem as a writer by comparison.

Because they can (sometimes) be unabashedly guilty pleasures. See also: the Twilight series, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Notebook, anything by Dan Brown.

Because they can be a wonderful source of unintentional humor. See also: Dan Brown’s 20 Worst sentences. This made me laugh for about twenty minutes: Read more »

Uh. Is that what I think it is?

Where famous writers delivered their first (and last) words.

The Caustic Cover Critic on Tutis, a publisher that takes public domain works and puts “ridiculously inappropriate covers on them” (see left), via The Second Pass.

The five stages of grief publishing.

Seven books that changed the world, if only they actually existed.

“I can’t control the kittens. Too many whiskers! Too many whiskers!” This and more from a husband who talks in his sleep, broadcast to the world by his adoring wife. Via The Millions.

The WSJ discusses the death of the slush pile, and M. A. Orthofer of The Literary Saloon responds.

Oh, this is sad. An anonymous visitor who is known to leave roses and cognac on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave for the writer’s birthday has broken tradition for the first time in over sixty years.

Lit 101 class in 3 lines or less, via HTMLGIANT.

Aaaand just for kicks, the Spampersand: Read more »