Online used book marketplace AbeBooks rounded up the most expensive books sold via its site in October. At the top is a collection of Scottish music from 1782 that went for $8,500. Also on the list are some collectible Tolkien and Hemingway. (Thanks, Laurie)
AbeBooks’ Most Expensive
Purity from Prison
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” Barrett Brown reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Purity from prison. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book.
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Was Milton a Bard of Smut?
An Oxford lecturer finds a “filthy, innuendo-laden… smutty… coarse, and frankly misogynistic” poem supposedly by John Milton – a far cry from the lofty Christian sentiments of Paradise Lost.
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A Really Quick Exorcism
It’s that time of the week wherein I remind you about the hilarious series over at Electric Literature, “Ted Wilson Reviews the World.” This week, Ted tries his best to remain impartial while reviewing that one sneeze he had: “The sneeze I had came on so quickly I didn’t have time to put my hand over my face and the spray went everywhere. It made me wish I had been standing over a salad bar so there would have been a sneeze guard handy. That’s why if I’m about to sneeze at Olive Garden I immediately sprint for the salad bar.”
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An Evening With The Millions
This Sunday, come out to the KGB Bar and meet The Millions! A pile of staffers including C. Max Magee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Emily St. John Mandel, Sonya Chung, and yours truly will be there, and a good number of them will be reading their work. The event even ends by nine, so you can rush home to see Mad Men.
New Miéville Fiction
There’s new fiction from China Miéville up at Tor. Miéville’s been a Millions darling for quite some time now, as these two pieces from Bill Morris can attest.
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The Water: Stay Out of It
Shark Week 2013 isn’t for another ten months, but you can satisfy your hunger for tales of nautical catastrophe and man-eating fish with these two databases: WreckSite, a collection of shipwrecks classified by worldwide positions, and The International Shark Attack File, a compilation of “all known shark attacks.”