With New Year’s Eve looming, LA Weekly is forgoing their usual cookbook of the week in favor of a cocktail book—The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and illustrator Chris Gall, the only beverage book that made it into their Best of 2011 “cookbook” list.
PDT Cocktail Book
Neal Stephenson’s New Digital Novel
The New York Times reports on the launch of Neal Stephenson’s new serialized digital novel, The Mongoliad, complete with video, music, and user-profiles. (via AuthorScoop)
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Angela Merkel Vs. Google Books
On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel took the opportunity to express her concern that Google Books threatens the rights of authors and potentially violates copyright laws, BusinessWeek reports.
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The From Scratch Club
“Claiming that feminism killed home cooking is not just shaming, it’s wildly inaccurate from a historical standpoint…As should be obvious to anyone who’s peeked at a cookbook from the late 1940s or early 1950s that promotes ingredients like sliced hot dogs and canned tomato soup, we’ve been eating processed crap since long before feminism. Yet the idea of the feminist abandoning her children to TV dinners while she rushes off to a consciousness-raising group is unshakable.” The perils of foodie nostalgia.
Odd Jobs
Recommended viewing: The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik talks about his early years in New York writing for the magazine “though they simply weren’t aware of it, or when they were aware of it they were extremely unenthusiastic,” and about all the odd jobs that often make up a writer’s early career, something our own Emily St. James Mandel has written about before.
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Touring The Third Hotel
“I thought quite a lot about the vocabulary of tourism, the kinds of desires that vocabulary seems designed to ignite, and the promises made, and how those promises change or vanish altogether depending on who you are.” The Paris Review interviews Laura van den Berg about writing, tourism, and her new novel, The Third Hotel. From our archives: our 2015 interview with van den Berg.
“There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention.”
If you’ve finished reading David Mitchell’s latest short story – which was published on Twitter last week and then ran on our site five days ago – you’ll appreciate Ian Crouch’s look at its greater meaning, and what it could mean for Twitter as a whole.
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