One Book, One Twitter: the world’s largest book club?
By Marjorie Kehe at The Christian Science Monitor
Don’t believe what you read, says author and editor Jeff Howe. “The Internet is not destroying literature.” If anything, he argues, “the new medium could breathe new life into a few old ones.”
To prove his point, earlier this month Howe kicked off “One Book, One Twitter,” which Howe hopes will become “the largest collective reading exercise in history.” As Howe explains in book industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly, “This summer, thousands of people from all over the world are reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods.’ They will then discuss the book using Twitter, a new-fangled technology that’s doing for the epigram what Anne Frank did for diaries.”
Read More here
Science Fiction Author Offers Readers $3,000 In Prizes To Read His Book
By Charlie Jane Anders at io9
The search for a new publishing model that takes advantage of the internet continues. Author Peter Riley is giving out $3,000 in prizes to people who’ll read his book, Universes, and answer some questions about it.
Riley, a former editor with the London Free Press in Ontario, has posted his novel online for free, and he hopes that running contests with cash prizes will “stir up interest on the Internet in order to get the book ultimately noticed and published.” He’s been looking for a publisher since he finished the novel in 1999.
Read More (and get the book link) here
Jane Eyre: From Gothic Heroine To Vampyre Slayer
by Eve Conte at Tor
Thanks to the recent surge of mash-ups of classic literature with the supernatural, the literary heroines of the 19th century are finding a new audience with today’s readers.
The latest literary character to go badass is Jane Eyre, who is now a slayer of various supernatural beings, in Sherri Browning Erwin’s new Jane Slayre. While Charlotte Brontë’s Jane always manages to land on her feet, in Erwin’s version, she also has the added inherent ability to defeat vampyres, zombies, and other creatures of the night no matter how downtrodden her personal life may be. With a name like Slayre, you’d think the young orphaned Jane would question her heritage, but she finds out soon enough that slaying is in her blood.
Read More here
That Twitter book club has made me finally want to join twitter. I’ve had American Gods on my bookshelf for a few months, but I always get distracted by other things. Now seems like a great time to read it.
what do you think of the twitter book club? Will you join the Universes contest? Do you think the re-imaginings have helped or hurt classical literature?
