The Bookfinder.com journal rounds up some links about custom library designers, who do things like “custom-design a $70,000 insta-library for a Saudi Arabian sheik.” Would you like to buy “books by the foot?” (it’s a great way to furnish a room, if not the cheapest) We’ve looked at this phenomenon before, in March and again in August.
Insta-Libraries
Goodwill in Brooklyn: On Donating Books to Unexpected Readers
I am uncomfortable shedding books. The three boxes my husband and I were holding, plus three more in the trunk of the car, were the result of a careful purge executed after living abroad for a year.
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Filthy is here
I got my copy of FILTHY today from Patrick Brown... man, it looks incredible. Great writing, great graphics, really nice paper. It's just a great-looking little magazine. Apparently Dave Eggers got ahold of a copy at the LA Times Book Festival and he loved it, and that can't hurt. If you want to take another gander at this little mag, check it out here. Also, if you want to download some music today, but can't decide what to search for on the file sharing application of your choice, can I recommend Esquivel... he will blow your mind.
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Destruction party
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Jonathan Safran Foer answers reader questions, chats
Jonathan Safran Foer posted an excerpt from Extremely Loudand Incredibly Close at Gather.com (one of those social journalism sites), and readers left comments. A few days later he came back and answered some questions about the book. Writes Foer:My parents have a photograph of me on their refrigerator. I'm about six years old, asleep on the sofa, wearing a plaid blazer, a blue sequined bowtie, and rings on each of my ten fingers. Apparently, the look was indicative of my sense of fashion for about a year. That photograph was one of my major sources of inspiration for Oskar.Foer will also be doing a live "Ask the Author" session at Gather on June 23.I'd never heard of Gather.com before I got an email about this from someone there. The site's a little too frenzied for me -- I'm having trouble figuring out what it's all about -- but the Foer thing looks pretty cool.
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Quick Notes: Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer
In the comments of the last post, Laura asked about a new novel by Zadie Smith called On Beauty. There's no release date yet for the US, but I suspect it will be close to the UK date, which has been set for September. The Guardian has described it as "a transatlantic comic saga," but I haven't seen anything else regarding the subject matter. Smith is also writing a musical about based on the life of Kafka with her husband Nick Laird as well as a non-fiction book called Fail Better that will come out in 2006.Of all the books mentioned in my preview post, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seems to be generating the most excitement. Among those excited is my mom, who was inspired to dig up some links to some old interviews with and articles about Foer. These may help you pass the time until his new book comes out: an interview with Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com, an interview with Decode Magazine and a profile in The Jewish Journal.UPDATE: Found this story when reading back through the archives at Conversational Reading. It asks when America's fiction writers will take on the subject of 9/11. While I think it's an odd request -- I've never been under the assumption that fiction writers are expected to pen novels ripped from the headlines -- we will soon have such a book: Foer's new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. From Houghton Mifflin's description of the book: "Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center."
Oprah’s at it again
I'm guessing that Oprah's latest choice for her book club was timed to coincide with BEA (the big book expo) going on in New York right now. Despite recent pleas for a return to contemporary fiction, Oprah has decided to stick with the classics. The latest pick is notable in that it's not just one book, it's three. Vintage Books has combined three novels by William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August - into one Oprah-branded set called The Summer of Faulkner which retails for close to 30 bucks. To my mind, the selection is also notable in that these novels are probably the most challenging books that Oprah has ever recommended. I've said before that I don't think that Oprah's focus on classic books is a bad thing, but I have to wonder if this latest pick won't provoke a backlash. Among the literary types there is already much consternation over Oprah co-opting classic novels for use on her TV show, and this latest pick, which repackages three of the greatest American novels into a "summer of" set, might be enough to stir critics into a frenzy. From the standpoint of the regular Oprah Book Club readers, Oprah may lose some fans who find Faulkner tough going and resent the 30 dollar price tag that got slapped on this pick. On the other hand, if this really does turn out to be the "Summer of Faulkner" and hundreds of thousands of Americans read his novels, I'll be hard-pressed to say that this was a bad choice.See also: All of Oprah's classic picks.
Amazon adds Statistically Improbable Phrases
In their quest to add more and more arcane content to every page, Amazon recently added Statistically Improbable Phrases to their pages for books that have the "Search inside..." feature. Apparently, Amazon is using an algorithm to determine which phrases in particular books are less likely to appear in other books with some interesting, though not terribly useful, results. Or so it would seem to me. (Although there is the prospect of a third party using this data to come up with some interesting applications). Anyway, to see it in action, let's look at the page for Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, and you'll see this near the top of the page: " SIPs: consultant caste, executive intern, snoring issue, head intern, dominant village," those, apparently, being some of the Statistically Improbable Phrases contained within the book. Then, if you want you can click on one of the SIPs to see other books that contain it. Here's the short list of books that contain the phrase "snoring issue."
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