How to use this Page

We've been told that our rss feed (the data that flows to sites like Google reader) hasn't been working properly (at least for some people) for about a month. Our tech wizards have recently gotten to the source of the problem and everything should be flowing smoothly henceforth.

Ladies and Gentlemen, are long paragraphs getting you down? Do you find your attention wandering before that webpage even has a chance to load? Are you having trouble making sense of lengthy stories that develop over the course of several thousand words? We have the remedy you seek!

Friends, kindly cast your gaze to the far right side of the page. There you will see (under the heading "In Brief") the latest, THE greatest, THE shortest improvement to the site: microposts. Guaranteed never to be longer than 140 characters. You have our solemn promise on that.

Subscribe nyrbclassics twitter feed (or just keep watching this space)

In the interest of streamlining the site, we've moved the links list to its own page. This should allow us to let the list grow, flower, go to seed, and so on, unhindered by a small single column of space. Just look for the link link in the far right column.

We're particularly interested in expanding NYRB author sites list (the more official the better, at the moment), so if you know of any, please let us know.

Shane at the enotes books blog points us to The Chronicle of Higher Education's useful and proper gloss on publishing terms. We herewith submit an alternative list, a sort of Devil's Dictionary of the publishing world, "Tom's Glossary of Book Publishing Terms."

From the Chronicle:
Blurbs: Spy magazine used to have a column called "Logrolling in Our Time": In pairs of reciprocal blurbs, authors would puff each other's books. Don't ask your mother for a blurb (unless she's a famous author in your field). Blurbs can help buyers to situate your work by seeing the intellectual company you keep.

According to Tom:
Blurb: A brief noise that embarrasses everyone.

Chronicle:
Publication date: A date, six to eight weeks after the bound book is available, before which news media are not supposed to review the book (to allow it time to get from the warehouse into the stores). Often, with scholarly books, the official pub date comes and goes accompanied by radio silence.

Tom:
Publication date: A sliding holiday based on the phases of the moon.

And so on.

Photo of a printer's devil from the photostream of One Lucky Guy

Way back in May, we were so struck by an assertion in John Clute's introduction to Christopher Priest's Inverted World that it seemed like a good thing to quote here. Problem was—the book wasn't available for a couple more months. Brilliant solution—write up the post and set it to go public when we had finished copies of the book. And here's where the plan went terribly awry. We accidentally published the post, which made it look like the book was indeed available. But who reads this blog anyway? In the five minutes the post was on the front page of the site, someone had sent it to the author (who was justly concerned that the book was on sale before he had approved the text) and it had been picked up by the science fiction blog spun off from Gawker, io9. What followed was a lively debate (sixty-odd coments and counting) about the definition of "hard" science fiction. Things got much nastier than we're used to around here.

The original post
The i09 post

We're really supposed to be twittering now? Sheesh! Here goes:

Staring despondently at the pile of contracts and invoices on my desk; logging on to typepad.

But it might not be a bad idea to make some blog posts shorter and snappier, in the twitter style.

We're really supposed to be twittering now? Sheesh! Here goes:

Staring despondently at the pile of contracts and invoices on my desk; logging on to typepad.

But it might not be a bad idea to make some blog posts shorter and snappier, in the twitter style.