Billy Collins doesn't recognize his own work on the Kindle.
In today’s news, discover what Jeffrey Eugenides is working on, why poets are wary of e-readers, and whether you are the next Nabokov. Enjoy!
- If you’ve been checking out blogs (or Facebook or Twitter) this week, you’ve probably heard of I Write Like, a new site that analyzes a piece of your writing and determines which literary great you “write like.” Shelf Life, Jacket Copy, and seemingly every other lit blog is talking about it, but my favorite post comes from Paper Cuts‘ Jennifer Schuessler: “[I] was told I write like Edgar Allen Poe [...] But then a colleague plugged in a paragraph from Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ and was told it sounded like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” Hm.
- If you’re wondering what Middlesex author Jeffrey Eugenides has been up to lately, a recent newsletter from his publisher, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, confirms what his fans have been hoping: he’s been writing (as well as starring in the hilarious Gary Shteyngart video we posted last week). The newsletter includes a brief excerpt from Eugenides discussing his next novel, which he describes as “A college love story? Maybe.” You can read the excerpt on Omnivoracious.
- If you’re a poetry lover, you may have noticed that it’s hard to find poetry collections in e-book form. The reason behind this is that publishers (and poets) haven’t figured out how to keep a poem’s form in tact while translating it to an e-reader screen. Earlier this week, popular poet Billy Collins was dismayed by the way his poetry looked on a Kindle. He told the Associated Press, “Prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.” Bookninja has more about the poetry/e-reader conundrum.
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