Did you think the title of the most recent book you read could’ve been improved if it had been a bit more straightforward? Then Better Book Titles is for you. Among their more inspired retitlings: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Gay Jewish Magicians Kill Nazis), Blink (Everyone is Racist), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (The First Book I’ve Read in Six Years).
Better Book Titles
Nothing Is Not Like Nothing
Robert Krulwich takes on two very different types of “nothing.” As he illustrates through the invocation of Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and outer space, “nothing” is a lot more complicated than you might initially believe.
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Dark Investments
There are many flavors of noir, but the one that may be the most relevant to our lives today, Julia Ingalls argues, is corporate noir, which often takes the form of science fiction. At the LARB, she writes about several examples of the genre, including Alan Glynn’s Graveland and Natsuo Kirino’s Out.
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Heineken Price is Going to Double
“A classic hustler and survivor … a type who never starts revolutions but who always figures out how to benefit from whatever the New Order is.” Some dispatches from a punk tour of the Balkans by Franz Nicolay, who may or may not be an asshole, big time.
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Could That Be Kafka?
“What a horrible silent noisy people they are … My feeling toward those mice is flat-out fear. It has to do with the unexpected, unbidden, unavoidable, virtually silent, persistent, ulteriorly motivated appearance of these animals.” It looks like Franz Kafka really didn’t like mice. Reiner Stach, author of the definitive two-part biography of Kafka (The Decisive Years and The Years of Insight) has released a new book of Kafka ephemera called Is That Kafka? 99 Finds full of fascinating facts that never found a place in the biographies at large. This Millions review of Stach’s biographies might also suit your Kafka fancy.
Red Scare
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism (assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to human progress.” Wait, what? The New York Review of Books reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
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“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”
Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch performed a haunting interpretation of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, and the actor has also recently signed on to play Hamlet on the London stage in autumn 2014. This raises the question: is Cumberbatch the British James Franco?
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NYRB Classics Winter Sale
Winter officially ends on March 19th, but you can take advantage of the NYRB Classics “Winter Sale” until March 25th. With 50% discounts on 65 books, your tax refund check might’ve just written itself off.