10 Bestselling Books with More Than 80 One-Star Reviews – GalleyCat

“We checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–follow the links below to the many one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews.” HT: DW

A Daily Email for Aspiring Writers Is Truly Inspired – Culture – GOOD

‘According to Figment vice president Katie Robbins, the idea for the daily email was inspired by the Figment community’s demand for more ways to get inspired. Among Figment’s many services are social networking, feedback exchange opportunities, and writing contests, but users were “always eager for more,” Robbins says. “We wanted to do something that would encourage writers of all ages to get into the daily practice of writing and make good, carefully crafted writing prompts available to them on a daily basis.”‘

Enhanced E-Books: Blowing Up the Book – WSJ.com

“Enhanced e-books—which have multimedia features such as audio, video, pop-up graphics, 3-D images and animation—are being touted as the next frontier in the digital-books landscape.”

The Millions : 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced

“Here are the finalists for fiction and non-fiction with excerpts and other links where available. As a side note, the NBCC award is particularly interesting in that it is one of the few major awards that pits American books against overseas (usually British) books.”

Writing is Hard « BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

Click for image.

Keep Giving Them You, Until You Is What They Want

“This quote comes from Dennis Palumbo, a former screenwriter-turned-psychotherapist, writing about rejection. He says it as a reminder that rejection is often arbitrary and impersonal, so if you take it as a reason to be somebody you’re not you’re making a mistake.”

The Business Case for Reading Novels – Anne Kreamer – Harvard Business Review

“I’ve been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I’m wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child’s newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn’t I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Or catching up on my back issues of The Economist? That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I’m reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.”

The Book Bench: Has James Joyce Been Set Free? : The New Yorker

“The passage into public domain of Joyce’s major works has been talked up in certain quarters as though it were a bookish version of the destruction of the Death Star, with Stephen Joyce cast as a highbrow Darth Vader suddenly no longer in a position to breathe heavily down the necks of rebel Joyceans.”

Prime Number Magazine

First print annual edition is now available.

Wordnik’s Online Dictionary – No Arbiters, Please – NYTimes.com

TRADITIONAL print dictionaries have long enlisted lexicographers to scrutinize new words as they pop up, weighing their merits and eventually accepting some of them. Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary. No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Shannon Chamberlain — Pale Fire Project

Abe Books Made $220K from 10 Rare Books – GalleyCat

“Book dealer AbeBooks brought in $220,330 from the sales of 10 books alone. The bookseller sold Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in November for $51,739. A signed first edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird fetched $25,000.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 7 Books Every Intelligent Person on Earth Should Read – GalleyCat

“‘Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet?’ one literary Reddit user asked Neil deGrasse Tyson earlier this week. The famous physicist and author responded with a concise list of classic books. For your holiday reading pleasure, we have collected links to free digital copies of all the books on his list. Follow the links below to download ePub, Kindle or text versions of the books.”

The Millions : Aragorn’s Publishing Company

“Viggo Mortenson, a.k.a. Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, also happens to have started a publishing company. Perceval Press is devoted to showcasing the talents of little-known authors and artists who might otherwise go undiscovered.”