We all need a little variety in our lives, so this week’s Monday Miscellany is a bit different than usual. Instead of linking to specific articles, today I’m linking to web sites that provide information for bibliophiles.
The LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS is now in preview mode, while our full site is being built. Here we are posting once a day in standard blog style, while the full site is designed to exploit the latest online technologies in ways that respond to a significantly transformed publishing world.
The great tradition of the American comprehensive book review, in magazine and newspaper form, has been in its death throes for years. The disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement (papers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and elsewhere have shuttered or radically shrunk theirs) has been accompanied by an explosion of titles in the book market. The net result: twenty times as many titles are published each year than were a quarter century ago, and we have one twentieth of the serious print book reviews. They have been replaced in partial ways by web-based reviews, many of them crowd-sourced or user-generated forums for book talk. There are many excellent websites, too, and numerous blogs, some also of the highest quality (and we hope to have deep linking relationships with the best of them), but very little in the way of full-range book reviewing, covering everything from architecture to YA, from academic monographs to genre fiction, and from the latest publications to classic texts — rigorously edited, carefully curated, deeply informed discourse by experts in their respective fields — has been mounted to take the place of the dwindling comprehensive print reviews.
Welcome to The Millions, an online magazine offering coverage on books, arts, and culture since 2003. The Millions has been featured on NPR and noted by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice, among others.
The Rumpus.net is an online magazine focused on culture, as opposed to “pop culture.” Pop culture can be hard to define and the term means different things to different people. Basically, we’re not opposed to things that are popular, but we have no interest in “art” created by marketing executives. And we have no interest in derivative art, like images of famous people made from shoelaces or Star Wars characters in funny wigs.
The site for die hard crime & thriller fans
Crime Fiction Lover was set up by two journalists who love reading crime stories – everything from atmospheric noir to pulp thrillers. The rise of Kindle, eBooks and iBooks interests us a great deal. We hope to discover and share some of the best reads on these new formats, but by no means will we overlook traditional print. There’s nothing like the feel and smell of a freshly printed book.
Metapsychology features in-depth reviews of a wide range of books written by our reviewers from many backgrounds and perspectives. We update our front page frequently and add more than forty new reviews each month.
The Story Circle Network is dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives and to raising public awareness of the importance of women’s personal histories. We carry out our mission through publications, a website, classes, workshops, writing and reading circles, and woman-focused programs. Our activities empower women to tell their stories, discover their identities through their stories, and choose to be the authors of their own lives.
The official blog of The Library of America
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.
New Directions in the Humanities
an international conference, a scholarly journal, a book series, and an online knowledge community
An Online Magazine on the Psychology of Fiction
Founded in January of 2011, Full Stop is committed to an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture. Despite the popular critical sentiment that the “death of the novel” is upon us, we submit that the opposite is true and refute the fatalism inherent in a narrative that threatens to ignore the diversity and quality of contemporary fiction. Additionally, because literature’s fallen state is tacitly assumed to be symptomatic of a failing on the part of our generation — not only a suspicion of our contemporary fiction, but also of our contemporaries — we find this criticism both condescending and rather silly.
Full Stop aims to focus on young writers, works in translation, and books we feel are being neglected by other outlets while engaging with the significant changes occurring in the publishing industry and the evolution of print media. We also want to provide a space where older works of fiction — whether they be forgotten, ignored, or simply deserving — can be reexamined and celebrated. While our focus will be on contemporary literature and literary culture, we feel that current discourse is enriched and enlivened by engagement with its literary past.
