O’Brien Now Carries a 100k Check

Tim O’Brien has been named the 2013 winner of the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The honor comes with a $100,000 honorarium. O’Brien is the first fiction writer ever to win the award. Although all his books are great, he is, of course, most well known for The Things They Carried.…

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Slate Says “Ignore Inspiration”

Slate has been running a series on the rituals and techniques of great artists. Today’s article, focuses on ignoring the idea of waiting for inspiration. “Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan,” Mason Currey writes. “In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do…

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Should You Pay to Make a Book About Success a Success?

Finances are rarely as they seem. The sports media blasts $100 million dollar deal headlines on an almost daily basis. But it’s only been in recent years that they began drawing the distinction between the guaranteed portions versus the purely imaginary Monopoly money the player will never actually receive. While basketball and baseball contracts are…

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Square Books Named PW Bookseller of the Year

During my time in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I was lucky enough to work at Square Books in Oxford. So I was particularly pleased to see the news today that Publishers Weekly named the store as Bookseller of the Year. Check out the full article here. Congratulations to all the gang down…

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Will Finishing a Book Change Your Life?

GalleyCat referenced an interesting post by Arthur McMahon in which he expresses a bit of amazement at the fact that “Completing a novel didn’t change my perception of life like I expected it to.” Some commenters at GalleyCat claimed they didn’t expect completing a novel would have any change, they write for themselves, not riches…

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