Graphic designer Jason Huff takes the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduces them (pdf) using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function. Book Bench highlights several of the absurd – if occasionally poetic – results.
AutoSummarizing the Classics
HBO Is Having Leftovers
According to sources for Vulture, HBO has ordered a television pilot based on Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, which “takes place in a world still reeling from a Rapture-like event three years earlier.” The project will be managed by Lost co-producer Damon Lindelof.
The Not-So-Invisible Man
“The novel is told from the perspective of an unnamed African-American narrator who considers himself to be socially invisible due to the color of his skin,” writes Variety. Following in the footsteps of its adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu is in the beginning stages of adapting Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man. Read our own editor Lydia Kiesling on Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Is She a Betty or a Veronica?
Lena Dunham is the new voice of the Archie comics generation. The Girls creator will write four issues of the famous comic, coming out in 2015. She’s not the only woman joining the comics industry. DC Comics is adding a Native American teenage girl, inspired by the real Canadian Aboriginal teen activist Shannen Koostachin, to the Justice League United.
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Bourdain & Books
As we mourn the loss of Anthony Bourdain, the Los Angeles Times remembers his impact on the literary world and the ways in which the literary establishment wanted him to ‘shape up’. A well-read chef and writer, Bourdain’s most well-known book was Kitchen Confidential. Pair with this essay on food writing.
Tuesday New Release Day: Gartner, Talib, McLain, Lively
Out today are Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, which was shortlisted for Canada’s top literary prize, and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder bestselling expert on chaos Nassim Talib. Out in paperback: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and How It All Began by Penelope Lively.
War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he’d never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers’. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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