Kyle Winkler, in an editorial for Vouched Books (which I’ve mentioned previously), writes that “books are an existential crisis” because we can’t possibly read them all.
“Books are an existential crisis”
Eat Your Heart Out, James Patterson
Meet Philip M. Parker, a marketing professor at INSEAD Business School and the man whose name graces the covers of over 100,000 books. Is he the most prolific author of the modern age? Well, kind of. Thanks to “a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes,” Parker and his company have combined to create over 800,000 titles currently listed on Amazon – including such works as The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Spinal Stenosis and Webster’s Icelandic – English Thesaurus Dictionary.
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Five Favorite Story Collections
Curtis Sittenfeld shares her favorite short story writers, from Alice Munro to new voice Jennine Capo Crucet.
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Art & Illness
At the Guardian, Brian Dillon writes about great creative minds who had fertile imaginations for the maladies that befell them.
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I Tweet Therefore I am
Twitter lets writers think in public, and it’s changing the way we write, Thomas Beller argues in The New Yorker. “Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?”
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From Wharton to Woolf
Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
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The Treasures of Yale Open Courses
Thanks to the Yale Open Courses program, you can watch all 26 of Amy Hungerford’s lectures on “The American Novel Since 1945.” Also from the program, I highly recommend checking out John Rogers’ series of lectures on John Milton and Paradise Lost, as well as Paul H. Fry’s “Introduction to the Theory of Literature.”
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(Don’t) Judge a Book by Its Cover
Dan Piepenbring writes at The Paris Review on judging a book by its cover in the Weimar Republic and the sheer mastery of some of the early twentieth-century German cover designers. Two related pieces from The Millions: our own Bill Morris on the pleasures of the typewritten book cover and Matt Allard on reimagining some popular cover art.
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The Pioneer Detectives on Kobo
Prefer to read your ebooks on a Kobo reader? Good news: the latest ebook original from The Millions, The Pioneer Detectives, is now available on Kobo.
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Thanks for the mention, Nick.