“Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.” –Margaret Atwood

The Morning News has a great interview with Tobias Wolff by Robert Birnbaum. As contemporary writers go, Wolff has a somewhat unusual publication record: he’s published one novel, one novella, and five collections of stories. But dip into any of them and you’ll see why. Wolff can rightly be called a master [...]

Lit journals fold if no one subscribes, and in the digital age, the same goes for podcasts. For the Washington Post’s Book World series, it’s get subscribers, or get the ax. Ron Charles, deputy editor of the section, explained the dire situation in an interview with Washington City Paper:
[T]he paper’s top brass [...]

Happy Halloween! If you’re looking for creepy literature or inspiration on All Hallow’s Eve, here are some recommendations (and warnings):

– The Baltimore Museum of Art is currently featuring an exhibit of paintings — some by renowned artists like Gauguin and Matisse — inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. This is only one event [...]

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times’s ArtsBeat reports:
McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 [...]

In the Arts section of today’s New York Times, Motoko Rich reports on the “tit-for-tat price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon [that] accelerated late on Friday afternoon when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for [...]

Worried that ebooks will be the death of paper books? Sales of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, don’t back that up. At first, it looked like more people bought the book for Kindle than in hardcover. But, reports the L.A.Times:
By the time the week was out, with more than 2 million [...]

It’s currently Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Association, and other book- and writing-related organizations. The purpose, according to the ALA website, is “highlighting the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or [...]

Some sad news: recently, we heard that venerable literary journal
TriQuarterly was transitioning to an online-only format. It’s sad enough to think that one of the oldest and most respected literary mags would no longer be in print, but there’s more to the story, as shown in this email from Ian Morris, TriQuarterly’s associate editor:
I [...]

Via Jeffrey Rotter: ReadThis is a great organization “devoted to promoting access to books and reading wherever needed.” Among other projects, they helped create a library last spring for the public middle/high school Brooklyn Collegiate.
Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) [...]