Paravion Press, a small press born in a small Greek island’s bookshop, print postcard-sized editions of short stories that are designed to be sent by mail, complete with a page for your correspondence and an envelope. To celebrate their Valentine’s publication of Katherine Mansfield’s “Feuille d’Album,” they’re holding a Romantic Haiku Challenge, whose winner will receive a free copy.
Love Par Avion
TLAN:WOTFOB Excerpted
Reif Larsen’s “The Crying of Page 45” appears in this month’s issue of The Believer. This clever, inventive essay is excerpted from the book I co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. You can get a taste of the piece at The Believer website, but the full essay in all its illustrated glory is available in the print magazine as well as in, of course, the book.
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Look at Other People Looking
“Delight in book collecting, and in showing off one’s book collection, is common, if not universal, among readers and would-be-readers. The biggest reason we spend money on books is because we want to read them (eventually), but that isn’t the only reason: we also like to look at them, and to look at other people looking at them.” Over at The Point, Jake Bittle considers why we collect books as opposed to simply reading them. He also points out, correctly, that books are very, very unpleasant to move, something our own Matt Seidel can confirm.
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The Root of Suffering
Who You Gonna Call?
After the death of Harold Ramis, it seems only fitting to read Esquire’s oral history of Ghostbusters. Dan Aykroyd initially wanted it to be an intergalactic drama, yet he and others were happy with how it turned out. “People in the paranormal field loved it. It gave focus to their work,” Aykroyd said.
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.
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Harry Potter and the Teflon Cloak
We’ve been jealous of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak since The Sorcerer’s Stone. Now scientists can make an invisibility cloak in 15 minutes with Teflon. We’ll never get our Hogwarts acceptance letter, but this is pretty close.
Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. “It’s the landlords of the market,” he writes, “who decide the mambo that you dance.”
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