Round-Up Archive

Round-Down: Reading As Luxury, or Necessity?

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  Garbage collector Jose Gutierrez gives new meaning to the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The 53-year-old Colombian man has been collecting children’s books out of dumps for the past twenty years in order to provide a makeshift library to the city of Bogota. He now

Round-Down: The Life-Saving Genius of The Drinkable Book

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Chemist Teri Dankovich recently created a life-saving tool in the form of a book with perforated pages that filter water. The book, simply called The Drinkable Book, “acts to both educate the user and purify their drinking water.” It is a low-cost, portable, and reliable alternative to other water purification

Round-Down: Poetry? There’s an App for That

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As students and teachers alike head back to school this month, the Academy of American Poets is offering an email service designed to better integrate poetry into the classroom. Based on the popular Poem-A-Day series, where a previously unpublished poem is shared via email to subscribers, Teach This Poem launches

Round-Down: Adam Johnson’s New Story to Sell for $9,000

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Adam Johnson, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son, has a new story collection, Fortunes Smiles, out today. The collection, which includes six stories, was recently reviewed, with high praise, by Lauren Groff for The New York Times. Each of the stories in the collection have appeared in esteemed journals such

Round-Down: Historical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing

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  Writer Catherine Nichols’ recent experiment, in which she submitted a manuscript to agents under a male pseudonym and received eight-and-a-half times the number of responses that the same manuscript received under her real name, confirms a gender bias in publishing that desperately needs addressing. Nichols is not without precedent in

Round-Down: University of Akron Press Shuttering

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Last Tuesday, highly regarded University of Akron Press announced on social media it was closing its doors, its employees having received “pink slips.” This was an effort on the part of the university–specifically UA President Scarborough and the board of trustees–to eliminate a significant portion of its debt, which currently stands at an

Round-Down: The Role of Writers in a STEM Obsessed Society

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The recent appointment of Dr. Suzanne Koven to the first-ever writer-in-residence program at Massachusetts General Hospital has me asking: is the U.S. as a nation starting to re-value creativity after years of putting math and science first? An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard and renowned writer, Koven, in addition to

Round-Down: Why GO SET A WATCHMAN May Have Been Better Unpublished

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Discussion surrounding the recent release of Harper Lee’s purported To Kill a Mockingbird prequel–or draft, or sequel–Go Set a Watchman has dominated the literary community for the past several weeks. Just about every article on Watchman touches on the question of either whether Lee consented to having the long stowed-away manuscript released. At

Round-Down: What You Should Know Going Into GO SET A WATCHMAN

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Today, July 14, is an auspicious day in literary news: Harper Lee’s much anticipated, and controversial, Go Set A Watchman is officially released across the world. An event for the record books–the title already broke the pre-order record held by the Harry Potter series and promises to break still

Round-Down: Stephen King Releases Exclusive Short Story Audio

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In what Alexandra Alter at The New York Times calls an “unusual experiment,” Stephen King has released a short story, “Drunken Fireworks,” which is forthcoming in his collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. The collection is slated for a November 2015 release, making this a months-advance sneak peek at