A leading Shakespearean expert in Stratford-upon-Avon has turned down a request to help Boris Johnson write his book on the Bard. The prime minister allegedly was working on The Riddle of Genius instead of attending Cobra (Civil Contingencies Committee) meetings.
Mr Johnson’s literary agent allegedly asked a Shakespeare expert to semi-dictate the content of the book to Mr. Johnson. The Churchill Factor, a recent book penned by Mr Johnson, was written in collaboration with his former research assistant Warren Dockter.
Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the Wolrld: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, has not been approached to help with Johnson’s book. He said, “I haven’t been approached and do not know who might have been. Have you tried Jim Shapiro at Columbia? If I were the PM, I might ask him.”
A huge focus of James Daunt’s keynote speech to the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) was how Barnes and Noble is bouncing back from the retail apocalypse. It also included a lot about mundane changes like new furniture to major overhauls of how books are even shelved!
One big change is that stores can now take responsibility for stocking their shelves — a real game changer and an advantage to authors who can get their books stocked at the local stores.
Individual stores will now decide which books they want to stock. Publishers used to buy a place on the shelves, but no longer have that option.
B&N has shifted from how it operated in the past, providing a much-needed opportunity boost for indie and small press publishers.
“It’s so smart of Barnes and Noble to position themselves as less of a big retailer and more as an indie bookstore,” said Miral Sattar of LearnSelfPublishingFast and author of the Self-Pub and Book Marketing newsletter. “There are lots of ways to get your print books into physical Barnes and Noble stores, but I always tell indie authors to distribute through IngramSpark for the print book distribution. In general, bookstores are more amenable to ordering copies from places that aren’t competitors (like Amazon).
“So if you want to get your physical book into a Barnes and Noble, distribute your paperback and hardback through IngramSpark, reach out to your local Barnes and Noble, make sure your book meets the Barnes and Noble requirements, and send your book to the small press department.”
Now that they have a chance to reach the shelves of Barnes & Noble, independent authors and small publishers can focus on forging relationships with local B&N branches. They at least now have a chance of competing against massive advertising campaigns and shelf space contracts from the Big Five.
This is an unabridged audiobook reading of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Alan Sillitoe’s story about a boy in Borstal who uses his running ability to make a personal show of his contempt and defiance of authority. It was awarded the Hawthorn Prize for the best work of imagination in prose and established Alan Sillitoe as a leading English fiction writer.
In this audio presentation, the story is read by Tom Courtney, who starred in the highly acclaimed film version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Part 1
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Part 2
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Part 3
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Part 4
The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Nebraska poet Matt Mason won national attention for his poem “The Start,” which appeared in the New York Times. He drafted the poem three years ago when he wasn’t comfortable with the political climate, later realizing the poem’s relevance last month as an angry mob swept the Capitol. The phrase “probably started” conveys that small remarks or acts of hatred can lead to violent behavior.
“It’s seemed like we were going more and more with the (hateful) language and never hitting the point of saying, ‘This is too far,’” he told the Lincoln Journal Star. “And if that point never gets hit, the violence is inevitable.”
It probably started
in a whisper, a murmur,
a low tone hardly caught by the papers,
a sticker, a poster,
a brick wall with slogans in fresh black paint
Mason hopes to challenge people’s perception of the partisan environment. As state Poet Laureate, he has organized poetry events in every county.
Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language writers ever. He is most renowned for his literary works such as Demian, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, yet he also made a name for himself as a painter. After the First World War, he learned to paint with watercolors. His paintings vividly depict Ticino’s landscape (Switzerland), where he lived from 1919 to 1962.
HIs art is a glimpse into the more intimate and hidden side of this great popular writer. On his psychoanalyst’s advice, a student of Carl Gustav Jung, Hesse at first reluctantly took up watercolors. Eventually, he came to enjoy painting so much that it became his favorite pastime. What attracted and fascinated him was the magic of nature and the expressive power of colors. He painted thousands of watercolors, mostly Ticino landscapes in vivid colors, and illustrated small books of poetry throughout his life.
This is a full-cast performance featuring Robert Foxworth, Pamela Payton-Wright, Stuart Pankin, and Jerome Dempsey and cast. I use this full audio recording of The Crucible in my classroom and intend no copyright infringement. It’s for educational purposes only. It was produced by The Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center (under the direction of Jules Irving and Robert Symonds) and directed by John Berry.
ACT I:
ACT II:
ACT III:
ACT IV:
Be sure to check out my Crucible Study Notes on YouTube:
The Wall Street Journal a few years ago ran an article about Swintec, one of the last surviving typewriter companies in the U.S. (Please see the WSJ article for more information.)
Edward Michael, who started the company in 1985, is quoted in the article as saying, “We’re typewriters. This is our specialty. This is what we know.”
Down to about 10 employees now from about 85 during the boom years, Swintec continues to sell typewriters at a click-clackety pace: between 3,000 to 5,000 units a year, mostly to universities, senior centers, and prisons. Yes, typewriters are quite popular behind bars — especially now that Swintec came upon the novel idea of a clear typewriter designed to prevent the smuggling of contraband.
From our point of view, typewriters aren’t going anywhere. After all, the vacuum cleaner, as Mr. Michael points out in the above video, failed to replace the broom. Nor did the typewriter replace pens and pencils.
Sometimes a silhouette is more significant than an ordinary drawing. A few traces of the pen, a few vibrant adjectives, are often sufficient to bring a character to life.
Take Owl Eyes, a partygoer at Gatsby’s mansion, a quickly drawn and excellent character who wanders into the library with intoxicated admiration. I’ve always seen this man as wise, someone groping through the booze-haze to understand the mirage before him. Readers have been lost in Gatsby’s house ever since, lost in his never-ending revival.
Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel.
What major work of fiction is so well established in the curriculum and canon yet is constantly and vigorously contested for its literary merit and ethical character? We’re not talking about books like Huckleberry Finn, which got sucked into a rage about racial slurs and censorship and the tireless battle over the N-word. With Gatsby, one must ask: Could Fitzgerald write well, or was he, as Gore Vidal said, just a novice?
Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel. Just as Nick questions Gatsby, readers question his book: Is this mere shallowness or astonishing depth? Like Daisy, Nick has been criticized for his passive attitude or worse, for taking part in the spectacle.
Even admirers disagree: is the book good, or is it great?
The answer lies not in the assurance of the perfect text but its unknowability. Despite the tight structure and well-crafted three-act framework, it’s full of wild ambivalence, stiff morality, and a love of money, as well as a lack of empathy from many of its players.
Fitzgerald was proud of his achievement, but his work baffled critics and didn’t sell well. “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson.
That question remains unresolved. Some reviewers have seen the novel as a slapdash piece of work. John Kenneth Galbraith sneered that Fitzgerald had no real interest in class. “It is the lives of the rich — their enjoyments, agonies and putative insanity — that attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social and political consequences escape him as he himself escaped such matters in his own life.”
True, Fitzgerald was bitter and envious of the rich. “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has colored my entire life and works,” he wrote to his agent, this coming from the same man who fell in love with Zelda because she looked expensive.
As we are borne back through this single text, we see that admiration might be one path to literary immortality. Still, we should be wary of endless interpretation and enjoy the traces of Fitzgerald’s knife-sharpened pencil.
The older I get the more I look like the poet Robert Lowell. If I could write poetry like Lowell, I’d be set.
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