A pair of pieces from The Millions are among the finalists in this year’s 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize: “Her Story Next to His: Beloved and The Odyssey” by Frank Kovarik and “Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction” by our staff writer Edan Lepucki.
The Millions Among the Finalists
Lolita, Cover Girl
Lolita has been, for decades, a great inspiration to cover designers, and all those great covers inspired architect John Bertram to hold his own cover design contest to see who could best re-imagine Nabokov’s classic. The resulting competition has now inspired a book, coming in August, with a cover by designers Sulki & Min that references a letter Nabokov sent to his American publisher, Walter J. Minton of Putnam, in April 1959 about the cover design for Lolita. “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.” More: An interview with Bertram.
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Badly Drawn Authors
Hooray, consumerism! Or, Happy Valentine’s Day, rather. For all you literary saps out there, here are seven valentines of badly drawn authors that are sure to thaw any frozen hearts. Don’t worry, there are plenty more badly drawn authors where those came from.
Spiegel & Grau turns to indies for help
Shaken by scathing reviews from The New York Times and The Washington Post, Yann Martel‘s publisher turns to independent bookstores for help.
Show and Tell
In theory, the author of a great novel is invisible to the reader, letting her stories and characters speak for themselves. In practice, however, it can help for an author to make herself known, as explained by Tim Parks in this essay. Sample quote: “We have the impression that if someone ever did find the full story of his life, we would immediately recognize the person we had in mind.”
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Listening to Poems
At The Rumpus, Darcie Dennigan pens a strange and beautiful review of G.C. Waldrep’s new collection of poetry, Archicembalo: “I dreamt that G.C. Waldrep was offering me a tumbler of Pepsi, and amid the soda bubbles were many pills.”
An Excess of Symmetry
“What a perfect couple, two halves of the same little orange.” Guernica Magazine has a fantastic flash fiction piece by Andrés Neuman in anticipation of his upcoming collection of stories, The Things We Don’t Do.