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Tuesday New Release Day
The big debut this week is Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. Also of interest is a new collection of essays by Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number. The much delayed U.S. edition of a controversial 2009 Booker longlister, Ed O’Loughlin’s Not Untrue and Not Unkind, is now out. As is this intriguing curiosity: Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, which purports to be the “first complete English translation of Nietzsche’s poetry.”
Shout Out
Recommended Reading: Aaron Burch’s new poem “Far from the Hudson” at Big Lucks. You might want to put some Wu-Tang on when you read this.
Point and Click
Recommended Reading: Owen Hatherley at the London Review of Books discusses postcapitalism and a world run by clicks: “The sin of ‘original research?’ – a solecism nearly as grave as ‘citation needed’ – is another reminder that the non-postcapitalist labour of academics is the basis of nearly the entire operation. Wikipedia is less a new form of knowledge than a novel packaging of an old one.”
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The Truth Is Here
Here’s a piece of news you likely didn’t see coming: David Duchovny has published a novel. Titled Holy Cow, it deals, in the words of interviewer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, with “a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism.” She talks with the X-Files star in this week’s Times Magazine.
Foetry Chronicles
Brett Ortler, a blogger at Bark, chronicles his effort to figure out why indie publisher, BlazeVOX, wants to charge him $250 to publish his book of poems. Follow-up posts reveal, first, that BlazeVOX has rescinded the pay-to-play scheme, and, second, that it now plans to go out of business by the end of the year.
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On “Buzzwordophilia”
In the latest Baffler, Evgeny Morozov argues that Silicon Valley, in typical fashion, has taken to “hacking” our language. Old, trusted words don’t mean what they used to mean, and complex ideas have been stripped of subversive implications. “Complexity,” he writes, “is not particularly viral.”
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