'Safe'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
That is why they switched to classics.
The thing that bugged me about the Franzen mess was that, IIRC, he gave the OK for his book to be used, and then started bitching about it. (IIRC, a lot of his bitching was about "Oprah's Book Club" sticker that was put on his book, and something about how that degraded the value of his art. Or something like that. I can't entirely remember.)
Jonathan Franzen is a moderately talented writer of literary fiction who bitched when his novel was picked for the Oprah book club because he doesn't see himself as an Oprah kind of writer.
The guy didn't want hundreds of thousands of sales to fall from the sky? What is he, crazy? You'd think he'd be eager to tapdance naked on barbeque grills to get Oprah to mention his book in passing. What's missing from the equation?
What's missing from the equation?
Snobbery.
I want the week back I spent on the book, too.
Snobbery.
Ah, thanks. I ws thinking that most authors who didn't want that many people to pay for their book would at least like the idea of that many people reading the book, but I suppose there are people perverse enough that they are writing for a certain select audience and will get weird if someone wants to drop off a truckload of money and profile in their yard.
I believe at some point early in the brouhaha he said that his friends were laughing at him.
Well, hello? Satirist. Can dish it out but can't take it.
My impression of the guy is that he sorely needed to have his friends laugh at him.
I've just read a story in American Girls About Town, a collection of short stories in which couple's landlord dies and they go to the funeral. The landlord was Jewish so they need 10 men to make a "minion". Is this an actual alternative spelling of "minyan" or it is some horrible copy-editing error?
I also just read an enjoyable retelling of a Japanese folktale about fox-spirits called The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson.
Horrible copyediting mistake, sumi. Pretty sure. Actually, likely a horrible Word autocorrection never caught contextually by the copyeditor.