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LitNotes: Overstuffed Edition
May 16, 2008

I didn't publish a "LitNotes" entry last week, so this week's will be supersized...

Required Reading for Academics: Jonathan Gottschalk in The Boston Globe on why literary studies need to be revamped and revitalized and subjected to more scientific methods: "Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions - from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology." Preach!

"It's Still An Improvement Over James Frey": Thus spake a Gawker commenter on the De Montfort University Wiki-Novel. It has to be read to be believed.

Authonomy for the People: HarperCollins UK has launched Authonomy (it's currently in private beta, but it's getting lots of attention nonetheless), a "community" where authors can submit their deathless prose for consideration. Does this simply mean, as The Guardian Books Blog's Jean Hannah Edelstein muses, that there's a new way to send out rejection letters?

You Could (Still) Look It Up: Not even the O.E.D. is forever -- at least not in printed and bound form. As Virginia Heffernan points out in this week's New York Times The Medium column, you can "geek out" at OED.com, but you won't find the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary on a bookshelf unless that's where you stow your laptop.

Bonus: It Puts Me to Sleep, Too: A new Boston University study touts the benefits of reading to children at bedtime. Goodnight, moon...goodnight, room...zzzz...lilollaydeewhisprn"Hush!"...zzzwhaaa?...Mommy did not skip a page!

Heard It on the "Geek Grapevine": If you write it, they may not read it. But if you write it and believe in it and get it to the people you know will love it, you may just circumvent the traditional publishing power grid and wind up with a minor hit. Just ask Leinad Zeraus, AKA Daniel Suarez, whose self-published technothriller Daemon has sold 1,200 copies since March; he's got a sequel in the works, too. His story is interesting for all frustrated debut novelists out there, but caveat author: you'll be doing all the legwork. Of course, some authors with releases from big houses may say that's already the case...

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on May 16, 2008 | Comments (1)