Moments after A Visit From the Goon Squad was announced as the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jennifer Egan answers a few questions about her reactions to the news. (via @The_Rumpus)
Egan’s Reactions to Pulitzer
What Do Vinyl, Heidegger, and E-Books Have in Common?
J-C G. Rauschenberg offers a loose phenomenological look at the persistence of vinyl LPs, and what they might portend for the future of the book.
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On Magna Opera
Nabokov fans, brace yourselves! Roxana Robinson makes a case against Lolita, “a brilliant book in many ways, but not a masterpiece.”
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Sound-Word Index: Say What You Really Feel
Emoticons are unbelievably passé, right? And GIFs are just too much work, right? It’s time to better utilize our technological advancements. Behold The Sound-Word Index, a project by Blanche de Lasa, Stina Gromark, and James Godwin that can use “sound, volume and rhythm” to “help to translate our emotions hidden behind our screens.”
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NYRB Winter Sale
From now until February 28th, you can grab New York Review of Books Classics titles at a steep discount.
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New Coen Brothers Trailer
Recommended Viewing: The trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen’s forthcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis.
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The Trouble with Explainers, with Making Things Smaller
“There’s much to be commended in the work done by FiveThirtyEight, or even Vox,” writes Millions contributor Brian Ted Jones. “But making problems seem smaller then they are is a harm that outweighs all the good.” He goes on to tie together the rise of “explainer” sites, the problem with “hashtag activism,” and also references to Louis C.K., Teju Cole, and Leslie Jamison.
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Picture Books
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when “picture books” were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole‘s reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Strout; Jelloun; Chiarella; Ellis; Yapa; Miéville; Gurley; Berne; Black
New this week: My Name Is Lucy Barton by the Pulitzer laureate and Year in Reading alumna Elizabeth Strout; The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun; And Again by Jessica Chiarella; American Housewife by Helen Ellis; Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa; This Census-Taker by China Miéville; Eleanor by Jason Gurley; The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne; and Even the Dead by John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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