Miranda Neville has passed away – If you are on Twitter, you have probably seen that the wonderful and talented Miranda Neville passed away peacefully yesterday morning. She had been struggling with cancer, and her last general tweet, on September 30th, was one announcing an “unexpected surgery.” An extremely talented ... more >
100 Years Later, Beatrix Potter’s Tale Of A Fanciful Feline To Be Published – Penguin UK editor Jo Hanks happened to find an unfinished copy of a new Beatrix Potter series, Kitty-in-Boots, that Potter had hoped to finish, were it not for World War I and other “interruptions.” Because Potter had ... more >
Obituary: Harriet Klausner – Janine kindly forwarded me a tweeted reference to Klausner’s obituary, which was the first I heard of her death. Indeed, I can otherwise find no mention of her death, outside of a reference to her date of death as October 15th on her Wikipedia page. Although the ... more >
Amazon sues 1,114 reviewers, some selling their opinions for $5 – So it seems that the ubiquity and brazenness of of positive reviews for sale on Fiverr has finally backfired. Amazon has filed suit against more than a thousand for-profit fake review sellers (I won’t even call these folks reviewers, because they ... more >
Novelist who redefined the ‘bonkbuster’ genre with her tales of bad behaviour in Hollywood. Source: The Telegraph Thank you to Katie F., who answered my Twitter call for a good obituary on Jackie Collins. I think this long profile from The Telegraph is great, because not only does it treat her work ... more >
Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic? -Adam Kirsch and Charles McGrath debate the question of criticism – namely whether there should be formal “qualifications.” McGrath laments what he seems to see as a general degradation of critical writing these days (ah, the good old days!), and argues that informed ... more >