Snazzy speculative book covers for some Jules Verne classics. (via)
Book Cover Beauties
Gulf Stream, Issue 9
The creative writing department at Florida International University has released the ninth issue of their on-campus literary magazine, Gulf Stream. The issue features the publication’s first inaugural Author Roundtable – a discussion between agents and writers from the Miami Writers Institute and novelists Cathy Day and Marc Fitten.
Legs All the Way to the Sofa
“It is hard to see why anyone would abandon the generous Pearce Sectional Sofa, so we must assume that whomever was under that cozy throw was taken by force. More signs of abduction: reading glasses left atop a rare antique encyclopedia, a half-finished glass of wine, and a decorative conch shell that has tumbled to the floor, not to mention the wide-open French doors.” Pottery Barn catalogue descriptions written by an aspiring crime novelist.
Take Three
You may have read our review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant. You may also have read our own Mark O’Connell’s review at Slate. For another opinion, you could read James Wood, who writes about Ishiguro’s “prose of provoking equilibrium” in the latest New Yorker.
Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace; Libaire; Emmich; Solwitz; Maum
Out this week: Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace; White Fur by Jardine Libaire; The Reminders by Val Emmich; Once, in Lourdes by Sharon Solwitz; and Touch by Courtney Maum. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
New Lit Mag Alert: The Austin Review
A new, non-profit literary journal has launched in Austin, Texas. Each issue of The Austin Review will include four pieces of flash non-fiction, four short stories, and one work of critical analysis. Special attention will be paid to writers from the city that gave us Sixth Street.
Transgressive, Interesting, Weird
This summer, Emily Books will launch a new imprint with Coffee House Press, featuring books “by women and gay men and gender outsiders—or people who had transgressive, interesting, weird personalities.” Also check out this Millions essay on what we call what women write.
Regietheather
Is that a severed prostitute’s nipple in my Mozart? At City Journal, Heather MacDonald mourns the rise of slick, irreverent productions of classical operas in Europe known as Regietheater (director’s theater), a theory of opera direction that holds the director’s take on an opera to be as (0r more) important than the artist’s text.
Characterizing Sleep
On this date 109 years ago, a cartoonist first paired the letter “Z” to the act of sleeping, beating out other attempts to write out the sound of slumber such as the tenacious “g-r-r-k-k-k-k” and the elegant “z-z-z-c-r-r-k-k-k-k.”
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