At Slate, Rosecrans Baldwin notes “Pick up just about any novel and you’ll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance.” Amazingly enough, he’s right.
In the Distance, a Dog Barked
JJS to LARB
“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?” asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. “He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.”
The legends and the largely forgotten
The National Book Foundation has an online exhibit of the runners up for the award since its inception in 1950. That’s a lot of titles, so you might like to let John Williams be your guide.
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Music for Book Lovers
The publishers of the 33 1/3 series have made public the entire list of suggested albums submitted by their readers for the next book. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss your chance–the “Under-22” category is open through May of 2016. Pair it with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson’s hilarious musical soundtrack for her graduate school screenplay.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
The word “whom” appears “just 53 times out of every million [spoken] words,” according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This does not bode well for members of future generations – some of whom may be fond of formality.
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What the Bestseller List Says about 2017
Slate books and culture columnist Laura Miller looks at what this year’s bestseller list tells us about 2017. One of her conclusions, “2017 was the year that the very concept of a best-seller became even more dubious.” After reading her analysis, check out our Year in Reading lists, whose authors found joy in reading and viewed it as one of the few good things of this year, even if the bestsellers of the year didn’t reflect those feelings.
A Bit Woody
Perhaps the best mashup of highbrow and lowbrow to grace the cultural ether in recent years is this innovative scratch-and-sniff guide to becoming a wine expert. The book, which is exactly what you think it is, declares that “not all oaks are created equal” and includes a diagram of “all the smells in the world.” (Related: literary tourism at Suttree’s High Gravity Beer Tavern.)
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Paging Elena Whoever
Is it possible to share something with a “maybe don’t read this” tag attached? The literary internet has been buzzing today over the moral implications of stripping a writer (and, by association, a human) of their anonymity after this piece on Elena Ferrante was published in the NYRB. Read it or don’t read it, but definitely read her work.
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New Dave Eggers Book in October
It’s official, kids: Dave Eggers will publish a new novel this fall. Named The Circle, the book tells the story of Maeve Holland, a woman who takes a job at a Google-esque company in California. Despite the seemingly idyllic nature of the fictional company’s campus, Knopf assures us that the book is “a novel of suspense.”
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I just checked my own manuscript. No far off dog barking, but some dog-related imagery. I have one visual image of a dog that isn’t central to the story. Does that count?
I loved this article–and not only because it mentions the wonderful Nic Brown! (He’s a pal.) I’m looking forward to Baldwin’s book.