- Appearing Elsewhere: VQR Young Reviewers Contest winner and Millions contributor Emily drops by the NBCC blog to tell them what she’s been reading.
- The NY Times fleshes out some of the details of Google’s digitizing agreement with publishers and authors, including getting into some of the numbers involved. We explained the importance of the deal last year.
- At Jacket Copy Carolyn Kellogg gets Sarah Weinman to discuss the secrets behind her incredible speed-reading ability. (462 books in 2008!)
- Carolyn also recently highlighted all the great literary magazines that supplied the featured stories in last year’s “best of” fiction anthologies, as well as the runners up.
- 80 years after the last one, a new Winnie the Pooh book is on its way.
- A timely and topical list: the Top 10 green books of 2008
- For the multi-tasker (or perhaps the really lazy): the book holder bracelet.
- “Had I an atheist friend who asked, ‘Can you tell me please what this religion business is all about, not as some metaphysical hypothesis or historical phenomenon, but what it really means to be religious?’ I might hand him or her a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. ‘Read this,’ I’d say, ‘and it will give you a pretty good idea.'”
- For sports fans: Bill James on why statisticians should boycott the BCS.
- That perilous question: why blog?
- Vice did a fiction issue.
- David Brooks discusses some of the best long-form journalism of 2008 (with links!)
- The outgoing president’s surprising reading list.
- The Hype Machine’s impressive top albums of 2008 project.
- Wikipedia find of the week: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
- A consideration of poet Jack Spicer.
- With apologies to William Carlos Williams, A poem for Blago.
- New short fiction from Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness (via Scott)
- Jonathan Franzen on the Social Novel (via OUP blog)
Curiosities: 8x Buffalo
How Yasmin Zaher Wrote the Year’s Best New York City Novel
"This is going to sound absurd, but in a novel, you can say the truth, and in journalism, you cannot."
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Things Got Weird: On the Early ‘90s Crack-Up
Ganz vividly renders the early 1990s’ shouty yet blankly confused alienations along with the endlessly gassy and vituperative “whither America?” debates.
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The Beguiling Crónicas of Hebe Uhart
'A Question of Belonging' is marked by an unerring belief that a good story can be found almost anywhere.
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Jazz Remains the Sound of Modernism
Armstrong and Ellington, Coltrane and Davis, Gillespie and Parker, were central to the same project as other modernists; they reconfigured time and space to craft an alternative way of expression.
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