Luna’s Prose Ramblings

There are many wonderful literary initiatives out there in the world. This time I would like to draw your attention to Fifty-Two Stories, an outlet created by Harper Perennial to give established and new talent a chance to spread their wings and short stories. Fifty-Two Stories will publish a story every week for one year.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announces that The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún will be published in early May of this year. The work by Tolkien is a retelling of Sigurd the Völsung and The Fall of the Niflungs as part of the poetic Edda. The work will include an introduction by Tolkien and note by his son, Christopher.

Boston-based ‘The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’ has concluded that publishing group Scholastic unfairly uses its book club for peripheral advertising. When assessing the monthly fliers that the publisher distributes among the schools and pupils that participate in their book club, Boston CCFC found that 14 percent of the items on Scholastic’s book club fliers were not books, while an additional 19 percent were books sold with mechandise like stickers, posters and toys.

Susan Linn, director of CCFC, reminded Scholastic that marketing in schools is a privilege and should be regarded that way.

“The message that children get when books are marketed with other items is that a book in and of itself isn’t enough. And what it does is encourage children to choose books based not on the content but on what they get with it.”

When contacted, Scholastic said that in a class of 24 kids, some of them will be turned on by a game and it helps kids engage in the book club process.

Thanks to an agreement between United States representative James McGovern and the Cuban authorities, copies of writings by Ernest Hemingway have found their way to the J.F. Kennedy Library. The items include several proofs and items of personal correspondence, some of which have not been accessible to Hemingway scholars to date.

It is well known that Hemingway spent a great deal of his life in Cuba, leaving behind an extensive collection of documents in his house in Fica Viaga after his death in 1961.