In the spring of 2006, John Unsworth taught a graduate seminar on “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers.” It led to one of history’s finest class projects–a browsable database of bestsellers, 337 in all. As with any bestseller lists, you’ll find a range of titles, everything from Thomas Wolfe to Tom Clancy, but click through and find that each entry includes an extremely detailed description of the book’s history (these were compiled by graduate students, after all); a mini-essay on its reception; images of covers, page layouts, and even some ads; and more. It is, in short, bibliophilic crack. (Thanks Craig)
Bibliophilic Crack
Going Home
Recommended Reading: Tyler Malone’s interview with Tom Muir, the site manager of the Thomas Wolfe memorial.
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Forty Four Presidential Flashes
Every Tuesday from now until November 6th, Melville House will post original flash pieces about the U.S. presidents. Here’s Millions contributor Steve Himmer on George Washington, and here’s Level End author Brian Oliu’s take on James Monroe.
From word nerd to language animal
David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: "It's a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird." The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.
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Read to Me Tuesday
Among the better Tumblr memes is Read to Me Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like: people choose a passage from a book, call in and read the passage over the phone. The resulting posts are compiled under the hashtag #RTMT and often re-blogged by rtmt.tumblr.com. As we see increased interest in social reading experiments like bookglutton.com, RTMT shows how the web might make social connection through reading aloud a possibility for the first time since, well, story time. Plus it's really, really fun.
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Rough Trade
Considering his first novel was a chronicle of gang life in the Bronx, it makes sense that the new book by Richard Price is a tale of the NYPD. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates reads the novel, remarking that it “retains a residue of Price’s absorption with his rough urban settings and with the phenomenon of a particular sort of masculinity.” Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Price and his crime fiction contemporaries.
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Joseph Roth’s Letters
"Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter," begins Stefany Anne Goldberg's review of the author's collected--and often outright misanthropic--correspondence.
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Ah, yes, the 20th-c Bestsellers Database! I always thought that was a great project. Funny story about it: I was a grad student at UVA when John Unsworth was there, and though I never took a course with him, I knew him fairly well from working at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, where he was head.
Just after he left UVA to go to UIUC, I got a techie position in the English department. (This was 2001.) One of my first tasks was contacting John to tell him that the woman who administered the English department server had decided to delete the 20th-c Bestsellers database and web site. The English department didn’t at all value it, apparently, which I thought was weird.
The thing was linked to all over the web, and of course moving it broke all the links. I always thought it was short-sighted of the UVA English department not to realize that keeping on their server with a UVA address would have been great publicity for them. But I suppose the University of Illinois justly deserves all that glorious Googlejuice! :)
Great class project!
@amandafrench
Seems like good ingredients for an independent Zotero reading group.