This “book trailer” released by Gary Shteyngart for his upcoming book Super Sad True Love Story has been the cause of much recent hilarity. If you have yet to see it, look for appearances by Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney and actor James Franco.
Gary Shteyngart’s Book Trailer
Where Every Novel Takes Place
Electric Literature has posted a “Map of the City Where Every Novel Takes Place,” so now you can know exactly how to get from Middlemarch to The Jungle Book via Jurassic Park.
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My Dear Antlers
Ladette Randolph began the Writers and their Pets series on the Ploughshares blog in large part to celebrate her beloved dog Sally. It didn’t take long, however, for the series to expand, which eventually led to this week’s entry about Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s pet elk.
A Flock of Pages
“Every one of these books is a herd of animals.” The Atlantic reports that a group of archaeologists and geneticists in the UK have used mere crumbs of parchment to study the DNA of several thousand-year-old illuminated manuscripts, the pages of which were made of cow and sheep skins.
The Best of the Best of the Best
Lots and lots of great stories populate Longform‘s “Best of 2011” list.
#history
“if you’re looking to sound clever, you could call it an ‘octothorpe’, the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it.” The history of hashtags, and other words that the Internet has given us.
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Whoopee Cushion
“Let the buppie and the arts section go to hell: Swiss Army Man is a film by which critics ought to judge ourselves. We have seen this movie before, in our dreams, when we were children. Its extraordinary contact with our oldest forms of storytelling seems to have rendered it an unintelligible novelty, but if we can’t see how gracefully everything in it matters to everything else in it — plot to character development to dialogue to music to art direction to setting to acting to cinematography — then there’s something wrong with us.” Daniel Radcliffe stars as a semi-animate, gas-filled corpse with amnesia in Swiss Army Man — a movie about farts. But what else is it about?
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Tuesday New Release Day: King, Eco, Schulze, Vonnegut, Catherine, Gallaway
Another packed line-up: New this week is Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetary, Ingo Schulze’s, and Adam and Evelyn (all three of which were previewed by us). We also have new biographies of Kurt Vonnegut and Catherine the Great. And new in paperback, sometime Millions contributor Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case.
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