Amazon has finished unveiling its top-100 books for 2010. At the top of the big list: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Amazon’s Top 100
Thanks for Nothing, Dickens
Want to publish anonymously (and then stay that way)? Be thankful you’re not friends with Charles Dickens.
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“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
It’s Tuesday. It’s New Releases.
Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has a new book out in the U.S. today: The Museum of Innocence. Also new on American shelves is the Booker Prize shortlister by Simon Mawer: The Glass Room.
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On Bad Reviews
Recommended (Archival) Reading: “The language is too rich and poetic for my liking” and other gems from Amazon one-star reviews of classic novels, dredged up in 2014 by Electric Literature. Pair with the worst book review ever written.
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The IMPAC Dublin Longlist
As of this morning, the 2014 IMPAC Dublin longlist is out, and the titles that made the final cut are an eclectic assortment. The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (which we reviewed) made the cut, as did The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (which won the Pulitzer earlier this year) and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (which won the Booker Prize).
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The Deep Also Impacts
Those of you out there who grew up in the 90s will remember that every disaster movie brought a slew of novelizations into bookstores. Even if the movie in question did badly, you knew that at least two adaptations of the script would pop up on shelves. At Hazlitt, Will Sloan wonders if the age of the novelization is over.
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Code-Switching Patchworks
Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”
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