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By Sean Clark, on April 21st, 2009  I’m finding it pretty hard to understand why people are still churning out clearly sub-par reader apps for the iPhone, and harder to believe that they’re seeing any sort of profit from these programs. Wattpad brings one innovation to the mix, but its humdrum presentation and centralized online library prevent it from being close to a contender for the go-to reader app.
Wattpad’s innovation is the ability to share. You can tag books you like which will in turn recommend it to readers with similar tags and libraries as you. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 21st, 2009  Author: Ron Rash
Ecco, 2008
Best ebook deal: Public library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
From the title of this novel, I did not expect a brutal story about the often gut-wrenching goings-on at a Depression-era logging camp in North Carolina. Once I got a sense of the premise, I did not expect to love reading it. Serena is not the kind of novel I usually love: it doesn’t have much humor, and it’s not particularly bent on entertaining its reader, although it is quite well written. What it does have is gripping, page-turning, keep-you-up-late drama.
I struggled with whether or not to make this book a Great Read. Ultimately, it’s a little too predictable, and the plot sticks a little too closely to the formulas it establishes early on. However, Serena is very hard to put down. You could finish it in a day if you set your mind to it; if not, it’ll be hard to stretch it past a week.
With summer just around the corner, consider Serena a phenomenal beach book for a literary-minded reader (with a significant tolerance for violence). …
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By Sean Clark, on April 20th, 2009  Amazon recently released the 100 semifinalists for their 2009 Breakthrough Novel Award. I was lucky enough to be one of the first round judges, and while I obviously can’t comment on the specific texts I read, I can say two of those I judged as a Publishers’ Weekly reviewer have made it to this next round. They were both excellent manuscripts, and I’m sure the other 98 that made the cut are of similar caliber. First novels are almost always a writer’s best, despite the flaws they inevitably contain, and reading these manuscripts before editor’s get their red pens to them is a treat indeed. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 20th, 2009  This book has been chosen as a Great Read.
Author: Agota Kristof, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, and Marc Romano
Grove/Atlantic, 1997
Best ebook deal: Not Available.
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
There’s an old adage that says history is written by the victors. And another that says war leaves no winners. In her dark trilogy set in a world clearly modeled after post World War II Europe, Agota Kristof questions the realities of war, and puts forth that war leaves behind no truth. These three novels (about 150 pages apiece) vary in style, but build thematically on each other to build a harrowing allegory of war and humanity. The writing is excellent, and the deep emotional ties between twins Lucas and Claus that stretch yet never sever over a lifetime make for compelling narrative. This is the sort of literature that is linguistically accessible and emotionally threatening, with a rewarding end result that leaves readers affected greatly. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 17th, 2009  
As promised, we’ve done an interview swap with online magazine Fringe. Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark was kind enough to answer our questions about digital publishing and some of the challenges of publishing an online magazine as well as their ideas on keeping up with a constantly changing literary and online landscape. You can read the other half of the swap, where we answer questions about ereaders, ebooks, and our plans for a the future on the Fringe blog.
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By Sean Clark, on April 16th, 2009
Lately I’ve been poking around on a great directory called the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (located here), which compiles articles about ebooks published in scholarly journals. In general, scholarly journals don’t get very much love from non-scholars. The articles can be pretty dry, and the gists sometimes tough to parse without a filter. However there’s always a lot of interesting reading provided from some very smart people in them, and they’re usually the first places to learn of new trends, studies, etc., before they are disseminated through newsprint and the internet.
I’ve filtered out some of the most intriguing and provided brief abstracts for them below, and I’ve only included articles that can be accessed for free in this post.
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 16th, 2009  This book has been chosen as a Great Read.
Author: Neal Stephenson
Bantam,1992
Best ebook deal: The Burgomeister
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
This is more of a heads-up about one of my all-time favorite books than it is a proper review, but here we go.
Snow Crash is a quintessential cyberpunk novel: an action-packed ride through a dystopian future, which in this case is threatened by an informational disease. This novel is funny, cool, and massively entertaining, and on top of all that, it has an intricate plot that includes Sumerian mythology, linguistics, computer hacking, and an insidious religious cult. The world Stephenson builds includes swordfights, hardcore skateboarding messengers, nuclear weapons as personal self-defense, a hyperinflated super-capitalistic economy, plenty of futurist lingo, and a vision of a virtual reality Internet-like place called the Metaverse.
If you like this kind of book, you probably know who you are. If you’re on the fence, take the plunge. Snow Crash is head and shoulders above the vast majority of cyberpunk sci-fi, and indeed above the vast majority of science fiction in general. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 15th, 2009 Some news about books and ebooks for tax day:
- For a minute there, it looked like Amazon was aspiring to be the Wal-Mart of books; they “deranked” a number of gay romances, and other “adult” titles. Deranking removes books from bestseller lists and buries them in search results: it’s essentially soft censorship. Well, the Internet exploded with outrage Sunday, and subsequently Amazon has claimed it was all a big mistake and pledged to fix it. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt because writers like Gore Vidal and Annie Proulx were also affected (and I bet Gloria Vanderbilt is pissed). However, Amazon spokespeople told the original complainant that they are in fact removing adult books from their search results. I don’t know quite who this is for—certainly not their “entire customer base” as they claim in that last link. If it’s so kids can’t get book porn, it won’t be very effective: I was able to get half a dozen sex scenes (for free through the Kindle app) on my iPod in, as they say, “under a minute.” Still, if that’s the goal, I’m fine with it, as long as they make it optional, like Google’s safe search results. The thing that makes me nervous is how easily it happened; and the only thing that keeps Amazon from doing such a thing for real is that they don’t feel like it. The whole thing is exactly why I was worried about the social power the Kindle is beginning to wield. Kindle users don’t have the option to boycott Amazon, at least not without losing all the books they’ve bought already. More on #amazonfail at Twitter, The Literary Saloon, Boing Boing, Neil Gaiman, and The Daily Beast, and here’s a note from the ex-editor of gay and lesbian studies at Amazon.
- Also in Amazon news, TeleRead is organizing a tag on Kindle books to indicate those which are uncrippled by DRM. The tag is “drmfree”; instructions on how to find it are here.
By Nico Vreeland, on April 14th, 2009  From BOOOOOOOM.com My thinking is that if you like books, you probably like art. If you don’t like art, you should.
Here are my favorite art blogs.
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By David Duhr, on April 13th, 2009 
This book has been chosen as a Great Read.
Author: Donald Ray Pollock
Doubleday, 2008
Best ebook deal: Public library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
The current Wikipedia entry for Knockemstiff, Ohio labels the community a “ghost town.” While its handful of corporeal residents would dispute the tag, Donald Ray Pollock’s short story collection won’t make you want to drop by and discuss with them the vagaries of collaborative reference guides—even if the writer does claim that his depraved, nightmarish characters are not based on real Knockemstiffers.
Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, a loose collection of houses and trailers sixty miles south of Columbus, and worked for thirty-two years in a nearby paper mill, spending much of his free time in and out of marriages and rehab centers. In his mid-forties, he earned a Bachelor’s in English, enrolled in (“The”) Ohio State University’s MFA program, and began writing about characters who struggle with issues that Pollock himself admits to having shared addictions, go-nowhere jobs, a sense of rural entrapment, and constant imbroglios with the opposite sex.
Pollock’s grotesque drunks and brawlers, speed freaks and dealers, sexual deviants and rape victims (the animate ones, at least) stumble bleary-eyed through the “holler” that they just cannot escape, carrying with them heavy regrets and bleak futures. “Sometimes it scares me to think I will probably spend the rest of my days wishing I’d blown a rabbit’s guts clear across Harry Frey’s orchard when I was six years old,” one character reflects, while another, looking ahead, thinks, “I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”
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