Following up on a contest to redesign the cover of Lolita, Venus Febriculosa is at it again with a contest to redesign the cover of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The prize this time is a whopping $1,000.
Covering Eco
Judy Blume on Tumblr
Judy Blume answered questions about life, writing, and her new book, In the Unlikely Event, on Alfred A. Knopf’s Tumblr on Wednesday. In case you haven’t checked it out, The Millions has a Tumblr, too.
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Previews, Ctd.
If our own lengthy book preview wasn’t quite enough for your appetite, you might like the preview at Writers No One Reads. (It probably doesn’t hurt that their list includes Beckett and Borges.)
Best of 2009
The Guardian asks various notable people, from Malcolm Gladwell to actor Dominic West, what their favorite books of the year are.
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Stumped and Delighted
This fantastic essay from The Rumpus argues for the abandonment of realism in American fiction. Charles Finch wrote an essay for The Millions on the truce between realism and fabulism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that pairs quite nicely.
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Bohane Wins the IMPAC
Kevin Barry has won the lucrative €100,000 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first novel City of Bohane, capably reviewed in these pages over a year ago by Bill Morris (whose drawing of Barry illustrates the piece). You can also relive this year’s massive longlist and quirky shortlist.
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