A few links from around the internets:
- The BookMaven responds to another one of those tiresome genre snobbery posts. I agree with a lot of it, but I’m not sure she goes as far as I would. So, I don’ have a PHD in Literature, just a lowly BA, but I’m baffled by the attitude that books are some different sort of story, that they are somehow required to only exist on a certain level which is not true for television, film, theater, etc. The BookMaven argues for her early genre snobbery by talking about how she liked to read Poe as bed time stories as a child. Um…. So Poe is thumbs up and Stephen King is thumbs down? What’s the difference, aside from a hundred years?
Poe and Dickens, and Shakespeare, and so many of the writers who are considered the luminaries of the form wrote FOR THE MASSES. In college, I studied Radcliffe and Austen and Behn and Scott and Burney and all those damned scribbling women whose novels were ridiculed by the literary elite of their time. I wrote my college thesis on LOST HORIZON, which Pocket Books likes to fashion “the first paperback.” (It’s not, but it’s a cute marketing ploy.)
- The Guardian is opening their doors for a short story competition. As I just finished my first short story in years and years (and my first ever for publication), I’m in such a short story mood. Would probably enter were I not busy busy busy with KU2.
- Lilith Saintcrow is off on another one of her exquisite rants about the publishing industry in “a good book ain’t all you need.” Check it out!
- An agent points out the lie that’s Bookscan numbers.
And finally, since I’ve been plotboarding, I found this especially amusing:
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:10 am
WHOAH!!!! That video is amazing?!!? so cool! thanks for sharing al your links, too!
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
If LOST HORIZON wasn’t the first paperback, then what was?
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Paperback binding is not a modern invention. It’s existed for a long, long time. Dickens volumes were often originally printed in small, several chapter “pulp” excerpts and then, once the book was finished, there was a hardbound “collector’s edition” released.
What the deal is with Lost Horizon is that it’s the first book ever put out by Pocket, and Pocket was the first American publisher with the idea of printing pocket sized mass market paperback novels. (Thus, the name.)