Karen Russell

I was so excited to hear that Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell (author of novel Swamplandia! and short story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove) had a new work coming out this spring. Then I heard it was a NOVELLA and I seriously heard train wheels screech to a stop in real life.

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The e-book is not going away - and that's not a bad thing for books. 

Ever since the advent of the Kindle, a doomsday cloud has hovered over the world of book publishing, a portent that the rise of the e-book will mean the fall of the print book, and eventually the end of any good literature at all.

Even with recent optimistic forecasts for the future of books, the underlying assumption driving the conversation is still that technology and traditional literary reading are somehow incompatible, different ways of life.

Authors Karen Russell and Donald Antrim are among announced Wednesday morning (though the news leaked on Tuesday evening). The $625,000 grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation are awarded annually, with no strings attached, to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." The foundation that Antrim's "fiction and nonfiction are marked by a contrast between elegant, concise language and the disorienting chaos in which his characters find themselves. 

 The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing.

Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s “Tenth of December,” which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists.

NEW YORK (REUTERS) - Disappointed book lovers and the publishing world lashed out on Tuesday at the refusal to declare a Pulitzer fiction winner, saying it would hurt sales and gave the impression that 2011 was a bad year for novels. Monday's lack of a decision by the Pulitzer board could also hurt an industry accused of fixing prices for e-books, critics said. It was the first time since 1977 that no fiction winner was chosen for the prestigious awards that usually spells guaranteed free publicity and a boost in sales for the author who wins as well as

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