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
Dispatch from Kolkata
Over at Electric Literature, Megha Majumdar writes about the changing architecture in Kolkata, the quest for authenticity, and nostalgia. Pair with Olena Jennings’s Millions essay on nostalgia for a life never lived.
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We Done Good
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Saul Bellow, “Wise Guy”
Writing for The Dublin Review of Books, Kevin Stevens reviews Saul Bellow: Letters, the collected correspondence of “Wise Guy” Saul Bellow, “one of America’s best writers and most interesting men.”
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Rolling Readers
“They don’t want to get off the bus because they wanted to keep listening.” A Texas library system has outfitted a handful of public school buses with wi-fi access and digital audiobooks, reports The Digital Reader. Pair with this celebration of perambulatory reading.
3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize
Attention! 3 Quarks Daily has announced its 4th annual prize for arts and literature online writing, to be judged by novelist Mohsin Hamid. Articles from The Millions writers have won before (a piece from Lydia Kiesling in 2010 and another from Edan Lepucki in 2011) and we’d love to keep that tradition going. Nominations can be posted in the comments of the announcement, so please recommend any Millions writing you have enjoyed since March of last year. And to all of our guest contributors out there, be sure to nominate your Millions pieces!
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Tuesday New Release Day: Auster; Whitaker; Lobo; Appelfeld; Reve
New this week: 4321 by Paul Auster; The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker; Mr. Iyer Goes to War by Ryan Lobo; The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld; and The Evenings by Gerard Reve. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.