Tweets of the Week

“Announcing Literary Hub” and more in Bookish Tweets of the Week

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All my nerdy lit friends (e.g. all my Ploughshares colleagues, among others) are excited for the launch of Literary Hub, a new aggregate of literary news around the Web.

I’m a sucker for any news about Kanye West, and was psyched to see if there was a connection between him and V.S. Naipaul. Spoiler alert: Naipaul’s biographer, Patrick French, was merely having a laugh while proving a point about how readers overlook footnotes. Bummer.

Aren’t they!? Love this turn of phrase.

“Fact.”

I’ve been loving the range of bookstore tweets with their Black History Month displays…but let’s keep them up all year round, please!

“Galway Kinnell & Anne Sexton, chatting” and more in Bookish Tweets of the Week

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Two greats, both gone from us now.

Angela Davis and Toni Morrison out for a walk; I’d give a limb to listen in on that conversation.

After just a few months under the HarperCollins umbrella, Harlequin is feeling the squeeze as the romance genre shifts ever more to digital:

Note this charming idea for indie booksellers, and, perhaps, for marketers when they’re trying to sell the books on their lists:

But keep this in mind as you browse at the library or bookstore:

And finally, happy birthday to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was born on this day in 1821. The Brothers Karamazov was my first foray into Russian lit – what was yours?

“Boo” and more in Bookish Tweets of the Week

/ Marie Sweetman / 2 Comments

Up first this week is Melville House, reliably keeping it light and getting into the Halloween spirit:

Boston Public Library’s infographic quantifies how much a community uses and needs its libraries:

Author Diane Cook demonstrates how Amazon’s recommendation algorithms get just a wee bit off track:

And finally, Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family (2008), had a few things to say about the wage gap in the publishing industry, based on recent Publisher’s Weekly salary survey results.

Even worse is the racial disparity, from the same survey:

Oof. The survey is honestly devastating. Have a read and let me know what you think.

“Munro and Robinson in 1983” and more in Bookish Tweets of the Week

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First, in a tweet that should be preserved forever, Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson are hanging out together in a photograph from 1983, looking impossibly chill and brilliant and beautiful. I’ve never wanted to squeeze myself into a photo more than this one. These are two of my favorite writers, and, more to the point, two of the most awe-inspiring writers of our time.

Then Edgar Allan Poe returned to Boston in the form of this gorgeous, eerie, windswept statue:

The Paris Review quoted Louise Erdrich on rejection:

Meanwhile, the literary world exploded over the news that French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature, confusing some…

While others took a more logical approach:

And finally, Joyce Carol Oates mused on what it means to write capital-L Literature:

What tweets would make your top bookish tweets list? Who else should I follow on Twitter for the best bookish news?