The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
Overlooked Books of the Decade
New Models for Publishing
A very thoughtful essay by Millions contributor Patrick at his home base, the Vromans bookstore blog. The nut of the piece is the idea that publishers can and should create stronger brand identities. Patrick points out some publishers that are already doing this, and there's some great stuff in the comments as well. The piece is a reaction to an equally interesting essay from if:book.
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Another View
"But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion."
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Curiosities: Cartoon Batting Averages
Colson Whitehead says "Wow, Fiction Works!"The LA Times has a clip from the movie version of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, directed by The Office star John Krasinski. (via)Carolyn writes about the real-life connection between Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen.The Village Voice shows off the final results of its highly scientific system of determining New Yorker cartoonists' batting averages.Cambridge Information Group, which owns Bowker, AquaBrowser, ProQuest, Serials Solutions and RefWorks makes an investment in LibraryThing.Vote in The 2009 Tournament of Books Zombie Poll.A book that has turned out to be so wrong it has become a collectors item (check out the prices): The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy
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sail I said sail I will Sail
In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, Julian Gough asserts that the Irish Naval Service’s decision to name two ships after famous writers is a problem because “the State hasn’t yet earned the right to be associated with Beckett and Joyce.”
Worse than the Delaware
You may have heard that The Paris Review Daily is recapping Dante’s Inferno. This week, Alexander Aciman guides readers through Canto 8, better known as the Canto in which Dante crosses the river Styx.
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Blue Nights
The secret subject of Joan Didion’s work has always been her troubled daughter. Her wrenching new memoir, Blue Nights, tells us why.
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