Who Wrote Elizabeth I’s Most Scathing Letters? New Research Suggests the Tudor Queen’s Male Secretaries Revised Her Correspondence to Emphasize Her Temper
An analysis of more than 500 missives found that Elizabeth’s advisers crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in her messages to such figures as Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI of Scotland
Authors
Stories about people who write books
The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul
The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul How did we get here? And how do we get back?
“Don’t think for one second that we don’t need independent writers. The forces of conformity and centralization of power are stronger now than ever. Books have always been our safeguard in such troubled times. But when books are controlled and constrained by the entrenched system, they fail to provide us with meaningful alternatives.”
Jack Kerouac’s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned
Jack Kerouac%u2019s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctionedThe draft %u2013 one of the Beat Generation%u2019s defining artefacts %u2013 will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie%u2019s in March
Percival Everett wins the National Book Award fiction prize : NPR
Percival Everett, the prolific author of dozens of books, won the fiction prize Wednesday at this year's National Book Awards. He won for his book James, which retells the story of Huckleberry Finn but from the perspective of Jim %u2014 the escaped slave Huck becomes friends with.
HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company
HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company
The Big Five publisher made a deal with an unnamed “artificial intelligence technology company” and is allowing authors to opt-in if they want to join the agreement.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told PW she appreciates the way Harper has approached its first foray into AI licensing, citing the opt-in model, which effectively acknowledges that the right to license works for AI rests with the author, as well as such other protective terms as limiting verbatim text output. And while she has some qualms about the 50-50 split between author and publisher in the Harper deal, she is pleased that Harper has acknowledged that this early agreement is outside of the standard publishing contract. “HarperCollins agrees that the AI deal is a one off,” she said, “and not setting a precedent for future agreements.”
Dracula author Bram Stoker’s lost story unearthed after 134 years in National Library of Ireland
An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, published just seven years before his legendary gothic novel Dracula.
Brian Cleary stumbled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while browsing the archives of the National Library of Ireland.
Gibbet Hill was originally published in a Dublin newspaper in 1890 – when the Irishman started working on Dracula – but has been undocumented ever since.
Stoker biographer Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his development as an author and was a significant “station on his route to publishing Dracula”.
The ghostly story tells the tale of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a hanging gallows as a warning to passing travellers.
Why France’s Most Controversial Novelist Is Also Its Most Celebrated
Why France’s Most Controversial Novelist Is Also Its Most Celebrated
Reviled as much as he is lauded, Michel Houellebecq holds up a mirror to a world many would rather not see.
What Books Last and (Mostly) Don’t Last
What Books Last and (Mostly) Don’t Last
“I’ll save the speculation for a science fiction novel, I suppose. But even limiting ourselves to literature, it%u2019s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. Acclaim has a bit better track record%u2014the names of early Pulitzer Prize winners are more familiar than the names of bestselling novels of the 1920s for example%u2014but neither is a guarantee of anything. Here%u2019s the bestseller list of 1924, which includes titles so obscure they have red-ink dead links because no one has bothered to even make a perfunctory Wikipedia page for them…”
Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI
My Books Were Used to Train AI
I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction (On Writing) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart. Because the capacity of computer memory is so large—everything I ever wrote could fit on one thumb drive, a fact that never ceases to blow my mind—these programmers can dump thousands of books into state-of-the-art digital blenders. Including, it seems, mine. The real question is whether you get a sum that’s greater than the parts, when you pour back out.
A Warning From the Unpublished Preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm
His Preface, “The Freedom of the Press” was omitted from the first edition of the book, then disappeared, and was not rediscovered until 1971. From it, we learn that Orwell had considerable difficulty getting his fable published. That wasn’t principally because of wartime issues. There was a shortage of books and his was highly readable. Rather, British intellectuals of the day did not wish to hear any criticism of Stalin or allusions to his atrocities…
A Warning From the Unpublished Preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm
And he ends his Preface on a high note,
I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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