- Most folks have probably heard that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on a 120 foot long continuous roll of paper, but now you can seen it. “Beginning this week at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Fla., and ending with a three-month stay at the New York Public Library in 2007, Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll will make a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries.“
- One great byproduct of the new translation of Don Quixote is that it has given way to many reconsiderations of the classic. Now the Atlantic Monthly weighs in.
- Also from the Atlantic, a great piece explaining how they choose which books to review and why their reviews may sometimes come across as atypical. It’s a great read for anyone who is tired of the prevalence of cookie-cutter picks and pans.
News Roundup
Back on Track
Following up on Monday’s post, as it turns out, that missing issue of the New Yorker turned up (bearing a paper jacket reminding me to renew and sporting a torn cover) a day after this week’s issue landed in the mailbox. So it appears as though I won’t be skipping an issue after all. Luckily for me, I’m going on vacation for a few days, and I’m hoping this will afford me some time to catch up. (Incidentally, you can expect The Millions to go dark through Sunday while we take a break.)
Dumas Lost and Found
A literary mystery reached its conclusion about two years ago when a lost Alexandre Dumas novel was published in French. The Last Cavalier had been discovered by a scholar in the Bibliotheque nationale de France as researched Dumas’ life. The book has now made it here in translation. The New Yorker covers the book in its “Briefly Noted” section, calling it “a breathless seven hundred and fifty pages,” which is certainly an apt description of the one Dumas book I’ve ever read, The Count of Monte Cristo.The CS Monitor raves as well and offers some specifics on how the novel was found in serialized form and how it was turned into a novel, “in much the same fashion Dumas himself did when transforming other epic serials into bound novels.”
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Going the Distance
In Elmira, NY, six high school students banded together to break the Guinness Book of Records marathon reading record. Says the AP:They whizzed through more than 20 beloved children’s books, including the six-volume Harry Potter series, seven Goosebumps thrillers and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. They wrapped up their epic, 128-hour performance on the school auditorium stage with Oh, the Places You’ll Go, a Dr. Seuss classic.Meanwhile, in Albany, other long-distance readers, among them William Kennedy and Andy Rooney, joined forces for a 24-hour reading of Moby Dick, as part of “Why Melville Matters Now” weekend at the Albany Academies school.
Blurb Silliness
Ed points to a great article about silly blurbs, namely Dave Eggers’ blurb for Daniel Handler’s novel Adverbs: “Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up, but still want to leave your own world and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.” I’ve noticed that a lot of Eggers’ blurbs tend to draw attention to the blurber rather than the blurbee.Another notorious blurber is Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight. Here’s his blurb for Apocalypse Culture II edited by Adam Parfrey: “Adam Parfrey’s astonishing, un-put-downable and absolutely brilliant compilation… will blow a hole through your mind the size of JonBenet’s fist. This book should be in hotel rooms.” And how about this for Mall by Eric Bogosian: “Eric Bogosian writes like an M-16 ripping through the brain pan of Western civilization. A read-till-your-eyes-bleed chronicle of American appetites run amok.” There’s a whole bunch of them collected in this old LA Weekly piece (scroll down). Interesting note: The compiler of the aformentioned piece called the book store where I was working with the list of books, and I read the blurbs to her over the phone. Ah, the magic of journalism. At any rate, the experience inspired me to, much much later, compile some collected blurbs here, here, here, and here.
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Indie Publisher Blogs
Richard Nash, the guy behind Brooklyn’s Soft Skull Press has started a blog. Aside from writing about Soft Skull’s books, Richard also plans to discuss matters of importance to small publishers. Look for his dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair coming soon.Another small publisher, Unbridled Books, presents its homepage in a blog-like format. Small publishers have to work hard to be heard among the media conglomerates that control most of the publishing industry. Using blogs give these little guys the opportunity to do something that their much bigger competitors have trouble doing, make individual connections with their readers.
Appearing Elsewhere
To celebrate the release of Issue 5 of the Los Angeles Review, published by Red Hen Press, I will be reading tomorrow (Tuesday) night at Skylight Books, along with fellow contributors Eloise Klein Healy, Stephanie Eve Halpern, Jamey Hecht, and Timothy Green. If you’re in the L.A. area, come on by!
New Blogs to Visit
A brand new blog called The Happy Booker has arrived on the litblog scene, and its proprietor Wendi is wasting no time jumping in to the fray. Also worth noting: I Read a Short Story Today in which Patrick reads and discusses a new short story (almost) every day. It’s pretty entertaining so far, but he should add comment functionality so we can get some discussion going.