From TalentSmart: Our brains are hardwired to make much of modern life difficult. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with uncertainty. On the bright side, if you know the right tricks, you can override your brain’s irrational tendencies and handle uncertainty effectively. Our brains give us fits when facing uncertainty because they’re … Read more
From the Wordfence blog: Things we need: 1. Money Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I’ve returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary magazines’ funding practices, … Read more
Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother’s promise and, slipping … Read more
From The Literary Hub: Edward Garnett’s daily job of ploughing through all the manuscripts submitted to Unwin by authors considerably less accomplished than Ford Madox Ford was generally a pretty thankless task, but just occasionally something was sent in which caused real excitement. Wilfred Chesson initially took charge of the manuscripts as they arrived at … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: With the Harvey Weinstein scandal putting a national spotlight on sexual harassment and assault, PW asked female professionals in book publishing about their experiences. Had they dealt with harassment, assault, or predatory behavior in the industry? Do they feel such behavior had become more or less common over the course of their careers? Do … Read more
From The National Review: American Heart, a young-adult novel to be published in January, is a kind of Huckleberry Handmaid’s Tale, only with Muslims. In a dim dystopian U.S. of the near future that’s been overtaken by a nasty “patriotic” movement, a white girl is oblivious to the burgeoning horror of Muslims being placed in internment camps, … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Costco Wholesale Corp. is expanding its home delivery services as food becomes an increasingly competitive front in the e-commerce battle. This week Costco started offering two-day delivery on shelf-stable food from its own website and expanded a fresh-food delivery partnership with Instacart, a startup that delivers groceries from retailers in one day. … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: As the water receded from Houston and relief efforts started to reach the coast of Texas, the news arrived that Lori’s Book Nook in the city of Rockport, Tex., was destroyed during Hurricane Harvey. “The roof blew off and other parts caved in on the building, so the contents of the bookstore … Read more
From Wired: Amazon employs 45,000 robots, but they all have something missing: hands. Squat wheeled machines carry boxes around in more than 20 of the company’s cavernous fulfillment centers across the globe. But it falls exclusively to humans to do things like pulling items from shelves or placing them into those brown boxes that bring garbage bags … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Interactive multimedia storytelling is probably older than recorded human history itself. The famous cave paintings of Lascaux, for example, date from about 17,000 years ago. While we do not know their exact purpose, one can easily imagine a narrator or shaman using them to describe a successful hunt or enact a ritual. … Read more
From Medium: It comes as no surprise that musicians and writers are of a similar breed. For artists of language mining emotion, penning songs and music is just a step away from poems, stories, and memoirs. Below we’ve rounded up our favorite books by musicians, so put on a record, crack open a book, and … Read more
From Fast Company: At a little before 9 a.m. on a Sunday in late March, a small group of people stood sheepishly eyeing each other in a lower Manhattan office building. Their friends, it’s safe to say, were sleeping in, sipping mimosas, and walking their dogs at this hour. Meanwhile, this group of bleary-eyed professionals—most in their … Read more
From San Diego Reader: Robert Schrader can recall the moment when he decided to close 5th Avenue Books, the cavernous, off-white, brightly lit used bookstore that lasted longer than most on what used to be Hillcrest’s book block. (Bluestocking Books soldiers on, but the Blue Door, Bountiful Books, Grounds for Murder, and the Cook’s Bookshop … Read more
From the Harvard Business Review: How much do you read? For most of my adult life I read maybe five books a year — if I was lucky. I’d read a couple on vacation and I’d always have a few slow burners hanging around the bedside table for months. And then last year I surprised myself … Read more
From The Verge: In January Amazon said that it plans to hire 100,000 more workers in the next 18 months, which received a fair amount of attention in the news. But it turns out that’s right in line with Amazon’s current hiring habits. According to the company’s fourth quarter earnings report released yesterday, Amazon’s full-time … Read more
From USA Today: Ben Bicknese is a tinkerer, the kind of kid who loves to take things apart and build new things with the parts. “I like to be science-y. I like the process of making,” he said, detailing his plans to build a hologram light saber. After he was diagnosed with kidney cancer at age … Read more
From author Sarah Mayberry: When I was a baby writer dreaming of being published, the idea of holding a real, paper book in my hands with my name on the spine was the be-all and end-all. I wrote 8 full novels over nearly 10 years before I was finally accepted for publication under Harlequin’s Blaze … Read more
Interviewer: Would you comment on the future of the novel? William Faulker: I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man’s capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back … Read more