Online raiders stole my book: In the digital age, anyone can publish more or less anything, legally or illegally, at the push of a few buttons. I recently found an entire digitised copy of one of my own books on the internet. Someone had simply fed the book into a scanner, changed a few names, and posted the text on a website. [Times]
It’s Not You, It’s Your Books: Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” [NYT]
The Rescue of John Steinbeck: The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck is how good he can be when so much of the time he’s so bad. There are talented writers who grow into their full maturity and then decline, slowly or precipitously. But that isn’t Steinbeck. You can divide his work up into coherent periods, but there’s no coherent trajectory of quality. [NYRB]
An Investment Banker Finds Fame Off the Books: Today Mr. Bhagat is still an investment banker, now with Deutsche Bank. But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history. [NYT]
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