Nominees for The Bookseller Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year have been announced. My favorite, which to me is not odd at all actually, is Bacon: A Love Story. Scatology abounds in this list, including: Peek-a-poo:What’s in Your Diaper, and The Origin of Faeces.
Oddest Titles of the Year
Tuesday New Release Day: Gaiman, Hage, Bell, Delijani, Calvino, Peach
New this week: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, Carnival by Rawi Hage, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani, the collected letters of Italo Calvino, and the seventh issue of McSweeney’s food mag Lucky Peach.
You Can Watch 24 If You Don’t Sleep At All
Attention Cinephiles: You can watch Hulu’s Criterion Collection films for free all weekend long.
This Could End Badly
Want to tweet as @Horse_ebooks or @TimTebow? Well, now you can. Just remember that with great power comes great Klout scores responsibility.
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Jericho Brown on the Tyranny of the Blank Page
Recent Pulitzer-winner Jericho Brown reflects on how the prize brings him new attention but the writing process remains the same.
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What Is It Good For?
“War isn’t a destination, nor is it a topic to be mined for scribes with nothing else to say … War can be a subject, like any other, and it can be written about well, and it can be written about poorly.” Here is Matt Gallagher, author of the Iraq-war novel Youngblood, in an interview with J.T. Price at Bomb. Last week, Gallagher interviewed another great young novelist/veteran (and winner of the 2014 National Book Award in fiction), Phil Klay.
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What’s Wrong with Books?
Jenny Slate and Gabe Liedman explain what’s wrong with books: “They’re heavy…the shit in them is dumb…”
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Biography: The Story of Our Times
“There is one rule [to writing biography] that all who try their hand at it come to know: until the protagonist reveals his or her character—his or her inner self—what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” David Levering Lewis writes for The American Scholar about biography and writing “the lives of African-American figures, and [finding] in them the story of our times.”
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The Stanford Prison Experiment: 40 Years Later
“Forty years later,” Romesh Ratnesar writes “the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University.”
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