Penguin is putting out snazzy, mesmerizing, jacket-less hardcover editions of a number of classics. These remind of the old books on my parents’ shelves. You won’t be able to get your hands on these for a few months though.
Hardcover Beauties
Self-Publishing… With Penguin
Want to be published by Penguin? For $99 (£60), you can! As stated in this Guardian article, “Penguin USA will provide the service through its genre-fiction online community, Book Country, which launched in May offering wannabe authors the opportunity to post their work online and receive feedback.” The news comes on the heels of Amazon’s announcement that Amanda Hocking has become the second self-published author to tally 1,000,000 Kindle sales.
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The Heyday of Memoir
Recommended Reading: This review of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir over at Slate. For a bit on Karr and some other Catholic writers with whom she is often associated, here’s an essay from The Millions.
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1Q84 Uncovered
The cover for Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 has been unveiled. The book is due out in October.
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One Yakuza Group Starts its Own Magazine
Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo, the largest Yakuza faction, has decided to start its own magazine focused on “haiku poetry, articles on the innocent pursuit of angling and entreaties to its readers to perform good works” among other things. Related: recently photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai.
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They Weren’t All Grimm’s
You might say the discovery of 500 lost German fairy tales is, in and of itself, a type of fairy tale.
Perils of the Humanities Students
In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain’s abundance of “students choosing to read humanities at university.” As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, “we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts.”
Indispensable Squares
“Nobody there but dirty old men who spit tobacco juice and try to look up your skirt.” The city square is one of the biggest architectural differences between the United States and Europe. Over at The Daily Beast, George Packer takes a look at plazas/piazzas and makes a case for why America needs more.
Some of these have been out in Canada for a while. You can even get ’em for $15 CAN plus tax, which a decent price for nice covers.
These have been in bookstores since before Christmas. Or, at least, I saw a few in a Border’s in CT in December.
I’d be curious to know if any of these are abridged. That “Treasure Island” looks like a winner, but not if it’s an abridged version –
A number of these were published a while ago. You can see them at Anthropologie.
http://www.anthropologie.com/anthro/catalog/category.jsp?popId=HOME&navAction=middle&navCount=90&isSortBy=true&pushId=HOME-BOOKS&id=HOME-BOOKS-NOVELS
Yes, many of them have been available in the states since before Christmas; I got two as gifts. It looks like they are slowly adding to the collection, so some books have not yet been released.
Neither of the two that I have are abridged. In fact, for the two I have, the insides are basically all the nice features of a paperback Penguin Classic. (Intro, Text, Notes, Appendices if necessary.) Actually, it seems like these are all just the insides of a penguin classic with awesome awesome covers.
Knowing Penguin, these books are printed on flimsy newspaper paper that turns brown in 10 years (or 5). The “hardcover” boards will be flimsy. Don’t buy em to keep around.