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LITERATURE by Howard Junker |
Contrary to yesterday's hype, literature has not been extincted by the Web. Instead, everybody literary has put up a page. (As an editor, I'm most pleased that editors haven't disappeared, they've just gone into the business of providing links and jumpsites, i.e., exercising their taste and judgment, just as they always have.)
1. My favorite literary locus is www.webdelsol.com, perhaps because that's where my magazine, ZYZZYVA, is located. But you can hop from webdelsol to all sorts of other strange and wonderful places.
2. Of course, if you just want to order an ordinary book, the locus classicus-and early model for online (money-losing) merchandising is amazon.com. Or, if you must, barnes & noble, the evil giant.
I'd prefer that you check out your local independent bookseller. Mine is www.booksmith.com.
3. A good overview of the book industry is Publisher's Weekly site, which will even tell you where your favorite author is going to be reading next week.
And link you to 900 publishers, 500 booksellers, 500 libraries, including the Library of Congress, which itself is a site full of links.
4. Another good source of links is the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, which offers some 75 authors' pages, and 50 other literary and book-related sites.
5. Any search engine should yield your favorite author's own homepage (usually maintained by his or her publisher). My current favorite is Po "The First $20 Million Is The Hardest" Bronson's. He's got a sense of humor.
6. Potential producers of literature, that is, writers themselves, might turn to the Poets &Writers homepage, which lists lots of fellowship, prizes, workshops, and links everywhere from The Academy of American Poets to On-Line English Grammar to Yahoo!Literature. Poets should check out the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo.
And...to stay current, that is, to remind yourself of what happened this day in literary history, try the literary calendar.
Howard Junker edits ZYZZYVA ("the last word") in San Francisco, California.