RIASS stuff:
Book Review: Other Brother by Simon French'Rating: 
Guest post: The Tale of Two (or Three) Genres
Book Review: Something Like Normal by Trish Doller'Rating:
Giveaway: The Last City by Nina D'Aleo'(open to all)
Other bookish stuff:
Vogue has dressed up Jeffrey Eugenides and Junot Diaz for an Edith Wharton Spread
Romney/Ryan quote or quote from'Gone with the Wind?'Its quiz time!
Does copyright matter?'Do I, as an author, have the right to prevent people copying my books for free? Should I have it? Does it matter? Copyright, he says, is often described as a way of ensuring that creative people reap the rewards for their efforts. This is quaint, he argues, noting that there is little justice in the incomes of writers. Copyright, rather, is about ownership and control. He goes on to conjecture what might happen if copyright is phased out altogether: would writers still write if they had no guarantee of an income? What would they write? How would this change the publishing landscape?
The past and future of San Franciscos independent book stores
Nick Earls on striking a balance with social media:'Earls looks at the emphasis on platform, and asks just what authors are really meant to be doing with their time. It it really reasonable to expect writers to spend 80% of their time self-promoting and only 20% writingparticularly given that writing kind of needs to exist to be promoted in the first place.
On women dominating YA (sigh, yes, its pathetic that in 2012 I even had to write that), and why men avoid it'. The author argues that while the very infrastructure of YA is supportive of women, its also a lot to do with the lack of prestige of YA, something Ive touched on before in my bookish thoughts posts. Prestige is a bit of an amorphous term, she argues, but its often correlated with lack of sales, awards, crusty old curmudgeonness, and writing in genres that are filled with old white guys. YA largely exists outside of this little bubble of prestige, and its managed to happily blossom away unchecked by the prestige-concerned world, which may be utterly unaware of its existence.
Neil Gaiman remembers sci-fi author Harry Harrison, an author best known for'Make Room! Make Room!, later made into'Soylent Green, and his'Stainless Steel Rat'series.
Denis Altman on Gore Vidal:'I learnt much from Gore Vidal, not least that if one craves fame one can never be certain one is famous enough. In that week we spent together in 2005 there was something very sad about his constant need to reassure himself of his importance, and the sudden bursts of anger about hurts and rivalries going back over a long career.
10 Great Works of Literature Written in Prison'What about'Notes from the House of the Dead by Dostoyevsky? One of my favourites.
Twitter Founders Launch Medium, a New Collaborative Publishing Platform
No Excuses: 15-Minute Goal Setting for Authors'Go on, you lazy-bums (hyphen there because the intonation is different from lazy bums.)
Vincenzo Pignatelli on creating picture book apps
Loving this book etiquette column on Book Riot. Todays question: what should you do if you spill coffee on your friends book? Also, did you know that when I was in primary school, my neighbour dropped my three-volume collection of the'Faraway Tree in our fishpond? I am still scarred.
Remember my post on YA books featuring dead girls in dresses? Check out these fantasy covers featuring cloaked blokes.
Buenos Aires offers pension to writers. Well-published authors from Buenos Aires will be eligible to reward a special literary pension after the introduction of a new bill.'In the end, this is about fortifying the pleasurable act of reading, which prevents us from turning into the equivalent of zombies, says poet'Graciela Araoz.
Love and poetry at the Paris Review:'Because we were on the same poems, I'd assumed we were on the same page. I thought Luke had been signaling the loftiness and grandeur of his feelings for me with verse. But I should've done a closer read. That first Stevens poem he sent me is about how one's desires for unity can never be perfectly realized, about how even sexual union is an imperfect paradise.
