Nicole Krauss Interview

We recently published our review of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Now comes news that yet another Murkami book will be hitting shores before the year is out. The Strange Library, already available for pre-order, is 96 pages long, will ship in December, and will include “full-color art throughout in a lavish volume designed by Chip Kidd.”

“‘There’s no success like failure,’ Bob Dylan once sang – but he couldn’t have envisaged the international notoriety that bad art would achieve in the digital age. Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail gleefully hops genres and centuries in a quest to understand our obsession with lameness. Clever, profound, bitingly funny, it’s a brilliant analysis from one of the smartest new critics around.” — Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies

An eerie collection of Polish book cover art from the 1970s and 80s.

A new Hemingway App promises to trim the fat from your writing in a way that the Great Bearded One would’ve approved. The app uses various color codes to highlight writing written in the passive voice, writing that’s too hard to read, and also unnecessary adverbs or complex phrases. Sounds interesting enough, no? Well, the problem is that someone ran the Hemingway App on some actual Ernest Hemingway writing, and it turns out that Papa himself didn’t even write to the app’s standard.