Southern Comfort
Occupy History
Recommended reading for history buffs in favor of wealth redistribution: Occupy History.
The YOLO Pages
This month, Boost House is publishing what the New Yorker describes as “the first English-language paperbound anthology of Alt Lit and its siblings weird Twitter … and Flarf.” The collection – The YOLO Pages – features work by Steve Roggenbuck, Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, and (of course) @Horse_ebooks among others. But far from being a compendium of “vomit jokes and image macros of cats,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith, the book also contains poems “that obliquely grapple with bigger issues of morality, politics, feminism, capitalism, and the environment.”
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Updated Advice Classics
Two advice classics, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Emily Post’s Etiquette, have been updated for the era of Facebook and Google Plus.
I’m the Best One Here
If, while sitting in a writing class, you’ve ever looked around at your classmates and thought, “Dear Lord, these people are navel-gazers,” you might want to know that British researchers have found evidence that you were right.
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Lydia Kiesling in the Tournament of Books
This week, our own Lydia Kiesling took part in The Morning News Tournament of Books, where she adjudicated a showdown between Scott McClanahan’s Hill William and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Who went on to the next round: the trans-Pacific odyssey, or the tale of West Virginia? (You could also read our own Edan Lepucki’s Tournament contribution from last year, or else read our own Nick Moran’s Year in Reading piece on Scott McClanahan.)
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Edan Lepucki Sells California
Congratulations to Millions staffer Edan Lepucki, who sold her debut novel California to Little, Brown at auction this week. The novel, which Edan refers to as “Novel #2” in her article “What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell,” will follow a young married couple grappling with a post-apocalyptic world. Consider us extra relieved given Edan’s proclamation in that article: “And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.”
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