Weekend Roundup

• When Maya Angelou and James Baldwin Walked into a Bar…(with thanks to Bridget Crawford.)

• Readers of this blog may not find this surprising, but as food for thought -- 12 common misperceptions about book publishing, courtesy of literary website The Nervous Breakdown. (hat tip: bookforum)

• How to Fail at Grant Writing, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I especially liked the advice about format and style:

Use very few subheadings. Grant reviewers are smart enough to figure out where the subheadings should be. A single multipage paragraph is fine.

Use a myriad of type styles. Within a paragraph, try to use BOLD-FACED, ALL-CAPITALIZED TYPE for some sentences, then italicize others, and underline still others.

• Tips on how to succeed at getting your work published are in Inside Higher Ed.
  

• The blog of the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University has a recent post inviting proposals to publish the diaries of renowned diplomat George F. Kennan (1904-2005).

• The Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation announces its Fellowship Program for 2011-2012. It supports "projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation and draw upon the holdings of the Archives Center and curatorial divisions at the National Museum of American History."