Our guest was founding editor Tom Lutz, explaining how the publication has grown over the last year. He also talked about how readers can support the new online magazine and how writers can pitch story ideas to the book review.

Press play below to listen to the interview. Lutz explained how writers can pitch the new journal: “It begins with a pitch from a critic. That pitch can go to this address: pitches [at] lareviewofbooks [dot] org. We look at everything that comes in. A lot of our best stuff comes from people I didn’t know until we started working with them.”

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Inspired by his 12-year-old son’s advice, University of British Columbia psychologist Alan Kingstone used the beloved Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual in an experiment.

According to Discover’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, the psychologist was studying why people “automatically look where other people are looking,” trying to figure out if we automatically follow other people’s eyes or if we orient on the middle of people’s faces. The D & D monster manual offered a variety of images to test how we see. Check it out:

He thought it would be easy to discriminate between the two ideas: just use the Monster Manual. This book will be delightfully familiar to a certain brand of geek. It’s the Bible of fictional beasties that accompanied the popular dice-rolling role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Regularly updated, it bursts with great visuals and bizarrely detailed accounts of unnatural history. It has differently coloured dragons, undead, beholders … Levy knew that the Manual contained many nightmarish monsters whose eyes are not on their faces. If people still looked at the eyes of these creatures, it would answer the question.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author Michael Dirda held an epic “Ask Me Anything” interview at Reddit, fielding questions online from readers about self-publishing, Amazon and the worst books he ever reviewed.

At one point, he talked about the worst book he’d ever read. Check it out: “Judith Krantz‘s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work. John Sutherland–a distinguished English authority on the novel and the best seller–once included Dazzle in his list of the 25 worst novels of the century.”

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The New Yorker

The new blog will expand the work of the Book Bench, the magazine’s old books site. “Daily essays will be the blog’s mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment,” explained the introductory post.

Check it out: “Our first day features an essay by Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Check back for interviews with fiction writers, staff reading lists, literary Shouts & Murmurs, cool-headed rants, barely checked enthusiasms, good-natured persiflage, and, with luck, lots of soft owls flying over the lane.”

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Many of these writers have free eBooks available online. We’ve created a list below linking to free digital book editions of works by these writers.

Here’s more about the list: “Over the past 25 years, Henry James has been the top-ranked American writer, according to the latest MLA International Bibliography. More than 3,000 pieces of scholarship have been devoted to him in whole or part since 1987 … Here are the top American writers as determined by the amount of scholarship on each. In brackets is the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”

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Gold had no disrespect for the art of writing fan fiction–she honed her craft by writing Harry Potter fan fiction.

Fifty Shades of Grey is about a young woman named Anastasia Steele meeting a man named Christian Grey; Twilight is about a young woman named Bella Swan meeting a vampire named Edward Cullen.  At Gold’s blog, a few readers listed plot similarities between the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey. We’ve linked to a few examples below–what do you think?

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Today Slate launched a monthly feature, the Slate Book Review. The New York Times has more details.

Check it out: “The first weekend of every month, the Slate Book Review will take over Slate’s home page, delivering reviews of the newest fiction and nonfiction; essays on reading, writing, and the great (and terrible) books of years gone by; author interviews; videos and podcasts; and much more. We’re proud to bring together Slatesters whose work you know and love with great new writers who’ve never appeared in our magazine before, all in one smart, essential package.”

As of this writing, you can read Allison Benedikt on What To Expect When You’re Expecting and Wesley Morris on “a poet’s investigation of blackness in American culture.”

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Follow this link to read Mars-Jones’ scathing review of By Nightfall that earned a golden hatchet and “a year’s supply of potted shrimp.” British journalists Rachel Johnson, Suzi Feay, Sam Leith and D.J. Taylor judged the competition. At this link, you can read all the shortlisted Hatchet Job of the Year reviews.

Leith explained why they chose the review: “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

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Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her post that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–follow the links below to the many one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

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NetGalley has opened the door for bloggers, librarians, and other readers to apply for review copies from major publishers. However, not all review requests get approved.

NetGalley has assembled a a practical What Are Publishers Looking For? page to maximize your chances of getting your NetGalley request approved. The guide reveals what individual publishers expect for review requests–follow this link to explore the page.

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Overall, Weiner (pictured, via)  found that out of 254 fiction reviews, nearly 60 percent of the featured books were written by men. Her long essay also counted authors reviewed multiple times by the newspaper. Follow this link to read the whole report.

Check it out: “Finally, of the works of fiction whose authors were reviewed twice (either with two full reviews, or review plus roundup) and profiled, one was a woman and ten were men. The men who received two reviews plus a profile were David Foster Wallace, Albert Brooks, Julian Barnes, Kevin Wilson, Nicholson Baker, Tom Perrotta, Russell Banks, Jeffrey Eugenides, Haruki Murakami and Allan Hollinghurst. The only woman who received two reviews plus a profile was Tea Obreht.”

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Most recently, the critic published An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War at New Press.

Daily Intel had a quote from Hoberman: “I would be disingenuous to say I hadn’t considered the possibility that this would happen to me eventually … I was shocked, but not surprised.” (Via Mediabistro Newsfeed)

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The Huffington Post unveiled a new HuffPost Book Club today. Starting on January 3rd, the club will feature 10 books next year.

In addition to reading books, the online group will use Twitter, Facebook, Instagr.am, YouTube and Flickr to share reading experiences. It will also feature events at bookstores.

Here’s more from the release: “We begin with one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction in recent years: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht … We’re telling you now, so you can add it to your Christmas list. We can’t wait to read it with you. The Book Club will officially begin on January 3rd. On February 7th, we will host an free event at St Mark’s Bookshop in New York City, featuring Téa Obreht. More on that soon.

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The University of California, Davis English Department has posted a statement at the top of their webpage, calling for Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi to resign following a harsh police response to student activists last week.

The statement also urged the school disband the University of California Police Department. In the video embedded above, you can see a line of student protestors staring at Chancellor Katehi in a silent but powerful protest.

Here is the complete statement: “The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for ‘a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.’ Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.” (Via Maud Newton)

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This morning, he tweeted the news: “couldn’t be more thrilled to be the new web producer for the books section of the New York Times.”

Here’s more about the new producer: “Williams, lives in Brooklyn, NY. From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and other publications.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

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