Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Update: There’s a new edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation too.
Some New Releases: Kingsolver, Pynchon, Plath
At Long Last
The Modern Language Association has finally weighed in on how to cite tweets in academic papers.
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Chocolate Tears
“I can tell you that it was his agent who thought it was a bad idea, when the book was first published, to have a black hero.” Roald Dahl‘s widow says that he intended for the eponymous hero of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be “a little black boy.” Pair with our own Jacob Lambert‘s fond recollection of reading Dahl to his son.
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Long lazy gainfully-employed summer
Recommended reading: “I am seventeen years old, and getting drunk is still a novelty. It has only recently occurred to me that my mother won’t think to check my breath if I’m coming straight home from work.” An amazing reminisce of summer employment from The Rumpus. Pair with: The New Yorker on why summer makes us lazy, and an ice-cold beer.
Sad Face
A new service called linkmoji will translate the letters in URLs into — you guessed it — emojis. What are the chances novels aren’t that far behind? At Salon, Erin Coulehan explores the possibilities of the emoji novel.
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The Lonesome Death of Lit-Fic
Guernica picks a scuffle with the VQR‘s Ted Genoways over what’s killing literary fiction. (Writers? Editors? M.F.A.s? How about late capitalism? Or the term “literary fiction?” Or the surfeit of articles about its demise?)
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On designing a Frankenbook
App designer and lit lover Dave Morris blogs about making an interactive app for retelling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the differences between video games and interactive reading.
Tiger, Tiger
The second movie trailer for Ang Lee’s upcoming adaptation of Life of Pi by Yann Martel has just been released.