Some will find Publishers Weekly’s list of top selling books in 2009 endlessly fascinating. The name I was most surprised to see on the list? R. Crumb, whose The Book of Genesis Illustrated apparently sold 119,914 copies last year. (via)
The Numbers
You’d like to think that you’re immune to the stuff…
The lights are on / but you’re not home. / Your mind / is not your own. / Your heart sweats (?) / Your teeth grind. . . . You might as well face it / You’re addicted to Twitter.
Love Advice from Chaucer
“Ich am Geoffrey Chaucer, and my litel poeme the Parliament of Foweles was the first to combyne the peanut buttir of Februarye the XIVth wyth the milk chocolate of wooing. And so Ich feel responsible to helpe wyth sum advyce on thys daye.” Love advice from Chaucer, via NPR.
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From Day Job to Night Job
“The idea came to Mr. Mallory one night as he sat on his couch watching an old favorite, Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a lamp switch on in the apartment across the street.” Published under a pseudonym, former executive editor Daniel Mallory‘s debut novel The Woman in the Window was acquired and published by his own imprint. Pair with: an essay about the emergence of “reimagined thrillers” that create characters out of setting.
The Pioneer Detectives on NOOK
Good news NOOK readers: The Pioneer Detectives is now available on the NOOK.
Redefining Our Image of Book Collectors
This past Monday The Paris Review revealed the winners of the first annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting prize. This prize is different from the average literary prize because it focuses on celebrating women under 30 who have a passion for collecting books. The prize was created by the Brooklyn bookstore, Honey & Wax. The owners “O’Donnell and Romney had observed that although the young women who entered their store were passionate about their collections, they rarely referred to themselves as collectors. Their hope is to ‘encourage young women who are actively collecting books to own and share that part of their lives, and to think strategically about the future of their collections.’” Meet the women and their incredible collections here and pair it with our post on the complete archives of The Paris Review.
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Convincing Reconstructions
“Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind.” On the role of realist historical fictions.
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