The Rooster Longlist

Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has picked Nicole Krauss’s History of Love for the October selection of Book of the Month. You could also check out her Year in Reading in The Millions.

A publisher in Buenos Aires is trying to give debut authors a leg up by... printing their books with disappearing ink?

Jessica Love writes for The American Scholar about some recent psychological studies on the art and perspective of storytelling. Of particular interest is the way "the first person does seem to encourage us to identify with the narrator, especially when that narrator is a lot like us." Not that identifying with narrators is the primary purpose of reading, as the New Yorker reminds us in a piece against "relatability,"  but it's something to consider the next time you pick up a novel and find a character who seems to be just like you.

At the Book Bench, slides of Roland Barthes’ diaries from 1977 in their original, hand-written form: “His brilliance, which indelibly influenced literary theory, semiotics, social theory, and post-structuralism, can make him seem as distant as he is renowned. Yet the diary entries... reveal Barthes to be extraordinarily sensitive and relatable.” (via The Rumpus)