If you didn’t like Elif Batuman‘s gut-punch to MFA writing (“Get A Real Degree”) in this issue of the London Review of Books, might I suggest Jenny Diski’s cudgeling of self-help lit in the LRB’s Diary essay?
Lady Boxers at the LRB
Obituary for Karl Miller
RIP Karl Miller, one of the founders of The London Review of Books and an editor of the magazine for thirteen years. Originally meant to fill a vacuum left by a strike at the Times Literary Supplement, the LRB grew into “the liveliest, the most serious and also the most radical literary magazine we have,” in Alan Bennett’s words.
Mapping Short Story Titles
The B.O.M.M. blog looked at our recent item Best American Short Stories: By the Numbers, in which we crunched some numbers behind the Best American Short Stories series, and created a nifty word map of the short story titles that appeared in the series from 1978 to 2008. “The most frequent word for a title (not including articles and such)? Life. It has appeared 9 times.” If anyone else decides to mine some interesting discoveries from the B.A.S.S. data, let us know.
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Proof that Obama is a Socialist
At long last…Google provides proof that Obama is a socialist! “Barrack” Obama, that is.
Take Three
You may have read our review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant. You may also have read our own Mark O’Connell’s review at Slate. For another opinion, you could read James Wood, who writes about Ishiguro’s “prose of provoking equilibrium” in the latest New Yorker.
Barnes & Noble’s New Bag
Barnes & Noble’s newest device, Nook Tablet, was unveiled yesterday. At $249, it’s modestly more expensive than Kindle Fire at $199, but half the price of the iPad, which sells for $499 and up. And from a technological perspective, it may be closer to the iPad. So what will this mean for the last major brick-and-mortar bookseller?
The Rooster Longlist
For the first time in the history of The Morning News’ Tournament of Books, the longlist of all the titles under consideration has been published. From these titles, 16 will emerge for the literary throwdown in March.
Barbie Bodies
Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex, writes at Mother Jones about “hotness,” commodification, and women’s bodies.
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