Dashboard? More Like Bookshelf: Your Guide to Literary Tumblrs

Lists Notable Articles
February 3, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 100 4 min read

Related Books:

[Ed Note: Don’t miss Part Two and Part Three!]

About two months ago, The Millions joined the Tumblr community. So far, the going has been great. The platform is perfectly suited for dynamic storytelling, and as a direct result, it is home to some of the friendliest book lovers around. However, the site’s SEO (or lack thereof) is regrettably unkind to Tumblr outsiders, and this leads to two things. On the one hand, the insularity stokes the kind of kinship that makes its community so tightknit. On the other, the lack of easy searching reduces each blog’s chance of attracting new (or outside) viewers. I’d like to change that. By creating this list of my favorite “literary Tumblrs,” I hope to turn you on to some of the sites that make The Millions’ dashboard that much brighter.

For convenience, I’ve broken this list up among several categories, but I haven’t put these in any preferential order. “Single-Servings” are the most quintessentially Tumblr-like Tumblrs: blogs that fill one particular, ultra-specific niche. “Reviewers,” “Publishers,” “Magazines,” and “Booksellers/Libraries/Foundations” are exactly what they sound like. Sites classified as “Marginalia” are streams of miscellaneous book factoids, images, and, well, marginalia. I’ve tried to avoid listing personal Tumblrs except for a few here and there. Finally, I’ve included a “Wish List” of entities I’d like to see enter the world of likes and reblogs.

1.      Single-Servings

2.     Reviewers

3.     Booksellers/Libraries/Foundations

4.     Marginalia

5.     Publishers (Big Six) — Bear in mind: most of these lean pretty heavily
towards being just marketing tools.

6.     Publishers (Littler Guys)

7.     Magazines

8.    Wish List

This list, of course, is by nature incomplete. I am sure I’ve missed a ton of standouts. Please feel free to let me know which ones I’ve overlooked in the comments!

[Ed Note: Don’t miss Part Two and Part Three!]

works on special projects for The Millions. He lives in Baltimore and he frequents dive bars. His interests can be followed on his Tumblr, Nick Recommends and Twitter, @nemoran3.

Lists

On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections

Lists
February 22, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 24 2 min read
To wrap up Short Story Week here at The Millions, we conducted an informal poll of our contributors, asking them to name their favorite English-language short story collections. The results form a kind of subjective bibliography, a personal pantheon of 45 favorite collections. We've added links to our blurbs and reviews where appropriate. We hope this list will be useful, or at least interesting; feel free to add your own picks, and blurbs, in the comments box below.The List:Triumph of the Egg, and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson (especially "Unlighted Lamps")Lost in the Funhouse by John BarthSixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (blurb)Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender (especially "End of the Line")Too Far From Home by Paul Bowles (review)Nice Big American Baby by Judy BudnitzWhere I'm Calling From by Raymond CarverThe Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (especially "Goodbye, My Brother")Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (review)Drown by Junot DiazThe Coast of Chicago (two votes) and I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek (blurb)The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg (review)Jazz Age Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (review)Across the Bridge, From the Fifteenth District, and The Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant (review)In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass (two votes) (blurb)Collected Tales by Nikolai GogolIn Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (two votes) (review)The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar HemonJesus' Son by Denis JohnsonAll Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones (two votes) (reviewDubliners by James Joyce (two votes)Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (review)Hard to Admit and Harder to Explain by Sarah MangusoThe Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield (especially "Bliss")The Secret Goldfish by David MeansCollected Stories by Leonard MichaelsOther Electricities by Ander MonsonDemonology by Rick MoodySelf-Help, Like life, and Birds of America by Lorrie MooreThe Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (especially "My Mother's Dream")Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. PackerEnormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace PaleyNine Stories by J.D. Salinger (two votes)Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders (review)Aquaboogie by Susan StraightWelcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (two votes) (review)Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster WallaceLord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar WildeExcitability: Selected Stories 1986-1996 by Diane Williams
Lists
| 1 book mentioned 24 2 min read
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Lists Screening Room

A House in the Country, An Ensemble Cast

Lists Screening Room
May 26, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 7 2 min read
There's something about an ensemble cast. And oh, the pastoral charms of a country house. Though I'd say this cinematic genre is English is certain fundamental ways, it works just as well elsewhere, a demonstrated by the list below (Italy, France, Greece, Los Angeles, Spain, Canada, the O.C.). One of the other interests of this genre is that some of its finest examples (Gosford Park, The Big Chill, Peter's Friends, and The Anniversary Party), work according to the classical unities (unity of time, unity of place, unity of action). Call them antiquated and fussy if you will, there is a certain satisfaction in a movie that stays put and, in something approximating "real time," resolves the troubles it introduces.Howard's EndGosford ParkMargot at the WeddingStealing BeautyThe Anniversary Party (Gwenynth Paltrow, John C. Reilly, Alan Cumming, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Parker Posey, Jennifer Beals and more - fab LA house)Peter's Friends (The Big Chill, across the pond: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brannagh, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Phyllida Law)The Big ChillSwimming Pool (Ludivigne Sangier avant nosejob)My Family and Other Animals (the inimitable Imelda Staunton and others - set in Greece, a must for animal lovers)"Arrested Development" (the dystopian take on the "country house"/ensemble cast)Mansfield ParkSense and Sensibility (Ang Lee's)Loaded (early Thandie Newton - a dark take on the genre)Belle Epoque (a young Penelope Cruz and a bevy of others easy on the eyes)"Jeeves and Wooster" (country estates-agogo, plus young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie)Jules et JimThe Barbarian Invasions (Canadian Big Chill)My Summer of Love (Emily Blunt and Natalie Press - a gorgeous, disturbing watch - a little Swimming Pool-ish)Match Point (from Woody Allen's recent spasm of Anglophilia)"Brideshead Revisited" (I think they're remaking it, but a little Jeremy Irons never hurt anyone)Coming Home (a very young Kiera Knightly, Emily Mortimer, Paul Bettany, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Lumley - very "Brideshead")My Mother's Castle (ah, Provence)Happy Memorial Day.
Lists Screening Room
| 1 book mentioned 7 2 min read

100 comments:

  2. Thank you for this. I only recenly discovered The Millions (two months ago) and am continually impressed by the writing, intelligence, book suggestions and general good-natured enthusiasm for literature, art, etc. It has quickly become one of the first sites I visit each morning. (I do plan to ‘support’ you guys, but being a state employee my pockets are quite thin at the moment). Thank you and all the other amazing writers at this site. Book lovers and struggling writers are not alone!

  3. Great list! On my literary journal I’m two away from having reviewed all of Shakespeare, and my next project is French lit. Essays, fiction, music, film :)

  4. Pingback: Color Disco » Blog Archive » Literary Tumblrs

  9. Give Me Something to Read (givemesomethingtoread.com) has been sharing long reads on Tumblr much longer than Longreads has.

  15. Thanks for all the submissions, everyone. I knew I was leaving some deserving accounts out, so I apologize for any oversight. Also, a scheduling note, the majority of this piece was assembled about a month ago, so anything we’ve only recently discovered was left off the cut — all told, perhaps a Part 2 is in order in the near future.

  20. Pingback: Book links roundup: a guide to literary Tumblrs, unemployment literature, and more | Quillblog | Quill & Quire

  23. Wishlist: Book Mooch and Good Reads, maybe e-reader sellers can tell me what’s cheaper than paperback or what out of print editions are available digitally and one day i’ll finally be convinced to buy one

    and something i started recently:

    http://www.pagetwentyseven.tumblr.com … eventually it’ll have the text from the 27th page of every book i own.

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  34. Pingback: Literary Tumblrs | Pop Loser

  36. It’s fantastic that Tumblr book blogs are getting some recognition! Although it’s a shame that you don’t consider any of the photography blogs (well, with the exception of one!) as “literary Tumblrs”. We do love to read and talk about books as well as post pretty photos of them ;)

  46. Pingback: Monday’s Link Roundup. | Dan Curtis ~ Professional Personal Historian
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  51. Thank you for the acknowledgement, Nick. We’re in the middle of redesigning our website. Once that’s finished (spring), we’ll have even more time to invest in the Tumblr.

    Best wishes,

    David
    Web editor
    Boston Review

  52. Great list! I’m off to follow most!

    I am an author using tumblr for two blogs, because I *love* tumblr. I do wish it were more google-friendly, but whatever.

    Mine are RedTash.com & LesleaTash.com. My husband’s tumblr is TimTash.com, and he writes fantasy. Long live tumblr!

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  62. I can tell this is a very helpful list, and for the first time I went to Tumbler, but…I can’t tell what it is (??) If I “sign up,” will they be sending me emails? Is there a place to post comments on what other people put up?

    Confused, so confused….

  63. Pingback: Newsday Tuesday « Books and Bowel Movements

  64. Great list… and funny timing.

    We actually just launched a Strand Tumblr a couple of weeks ago! (We were still in testing mode when you were compiling this list.)

    So check it out:
    http://www.strandbooks.tumblr.com

    We’ve got staff reads, general book-related musings, and fun scans of the random objects we find embedded in the pages of used books.

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  70. Pingback: Useful Links (Weekly) « Rhondda's Reflections – wandering around the Web

  71. Literary radio program and Web site. Accepts submissions for Poem of the Week. Interviews with poets and writers. Music and interviews from up-and-coming musicians. Other original content.

  72. Pingback: Tumblr for books? « threefortnights
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  79. Hi, my blog is also on literature (with film on the side!) Please follow it on tumblr! :D

    afilmandlitlover.tumblr.com

    Thanks!

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  84. As a tumblr lover-user, I appreciated this list and subscribed to all your recs–thank you–didn’t realize so much talent was at my fingertips and in my dash. May I also recommend WhiteElephantInTheRoom.tumblr.com?

    Not my site–have never even met the writer. Quite literary. Great voice.

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  86. Pingback: Links: EBM’s, philosophical novels, literary tumblrs, and more : Writing Tips and Publishing Advice from Chrysalis Editorial
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  88. Pingback: The Week in Writing: A List of My Favorite Posts & Tips 1/4/13 | Kami Garcia -- NYT Bestselling Author (The Beautiful Creatures Novels & Unbreakable, The Legion: Book - Coming 2013)
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  99. Pingback: The Literary Lowdown: February 17, 2015Tales Between the Pages

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Essays Notable Articles

The ___’s Daughter

Essays Notable Articles
March 28, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 93 8 min read
1. Titles have a way of coming in waves. There was a time a few years back when it seemed like vast numbers of books were being published on the subject of secret lives, as in The Secret Life of Bees, The Secret Lives of Buildings, The Secret Lives of Words, etc. Our literature seems to hold a parallel obsession with vanishing, which involves of course any number of titles involving the words "Disappear" or "Vanishing" or "Lost." But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon. Seriously, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had ads for both The Sausage Maker’s Daughters and The Witch’s Daughter. I’m Facebook friends with the authors of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Baker’s Daughter, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, and The Murderer’s Daughters, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I was curious to see how many of these books there actually are, so I did a search for books with “The” and “Daughter” in their titles on Goodreads. Afterward I spent some time copying and pasting all instances of The ___’s Daughter into an Excel spreadsheet. How much time? A lot, because I’m studying a foreign language, and cutting and pasting text is exactly the kind of mindless activity that can be done while I’m listening to language podcasts. I was careful to collect only books that adhered to the "The ___’s Daughter" formula. So I didn’t include The Murderer’s Daughters, for example, or The Kitchen Daughter. Even leaving those variations out, though, and deleting any instances where the same book appeared more than once in the search results, the number of The ___’s Daughter books out there is truly staggering. Once I went back over my spreadsheet to remove duplications, I was left with 530 titles. But I don’t mean to suggest that five hundred and thirty represents the total number of these books. Five hundred and thirty was just the arbitrary point where I decided to stop counting, because the project was starting to take too much time. I was only on page 88 of 200 pages of search results. 2. To be clear, I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling one’s book The ___’s Daughter. I think those titles have a marvelous rhythm to them. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder why there seemed to be so many of them. Where to begin? I could ask any of the four or five authors I know with Daughter titles, but as a general rule I hesitate to ask any author to comment publicly on either the title or the cover art of their books. These are things over which the author doesn’t necessarily have much control, and I know of at least one author whose book’s gone to press with a title that the author doesn’t particularly care for. If it should happen that an author doesn’t love the title they end up with, this isn’t something they can really talk about publicly without alienating their publisher. No authors, then, because I don’t want to put anyone in an awkward position. I turned, as I like to do whenever a publishing-related question arises, to the booksellers. Partly because I know a lot of independent booksellers and they’re some of my favorite people, and partly because one of the things I’ve noticed about independent booksellers is that they’re much more outspoken about publishing than most people in publishing are. It’s a nice quality. Stephanie Anderson is the manager of WORD in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She’s one of those people who probably reads more books in a month than I read in a year and knows everything there is to know about bookselling. I asked her if The ___’s Daughter books sell better than other books, or if she had any other theories about why there are so many of them. “If I have any theory about it at all,” she said... ...it's that familiar-sounding titles drive sales because they help give readers a small feeling of comfort when they're contemplating which book to purchase out of the thousands and thousands available. Maybe repeated words like daughter, wife, salt, etc. etc., give an overwhelmed person standing in front of a new fiction table a place to start? And it goes double for the books with the empty shoes and the headless girls in sundresses on the cover. If you've had a good experience with one in the past, it makes sense to try something similar on your next trip. She’s right, there are an awful lot of headless girls in sundresses on the covers of contemporary fiction, although I hadn’t noticed the empty shoes. What I found fascinating was that she said she’d never had a customer mix up the daughters in these books’ titles. Apparently no one comes into the store looking for The Apothecary’s Daughter when they mean The Apostate’s Daughter. Her colleague Jenn Northington echoed this. “I've been wracking my brain,” she said, “and I can't come up with a single time where I've had to do a ‘something something's daughter’ title search.” This might sound unremarkable, except that people come into bookstores all the time with only the faintest idea of the title they’re looking for. Stephanie told me she’s heard any number of bizarre variations on Eat, Pray, Love; no one could keep it straight. Titles can be difficult to remember, and I see evidence of this nearly every day, because I follow a lot of booksellers on Twitter. They all follow each other too, and several times a week one of them will send out an appeal for help from the book-minded Twitterverse, as in “Customer just came into the store asking for novel with the word ‘boat’ in the title. Anyone?” or “Customer looking for story collection, don’t know title or author name, but the jacket might be yellow?” Perhaps, then, there’s something about the rhythm and construction of these titles that aids memory, which means that naming your book The ___’s Daughter is a very sensible thing to do. Perhaps the construction is so familiar that the average reader, having seen dozens or even hundreds of these titles, only really has to remember one word; perhaps at a certain point the mind plugs in The and Daughter automatically. 3. There are a steady trickle of these titles in every decade, from the early 1900s through the present day, but my extremely unscientific and incomplete data suggests that it’s a growing trend. Just because a given set of data is wildly unscientific and woefully incomplete, does that mean it shouldn't be graphed? No. It does not. I sorted my list of 530 titles by date and fired up PowerPoint. Fig. 1: Books Titled The ___’s Daughter, 1990-2011 One can of course go back much further, but previous decades are less dramatic and are also probably even less complete and even more wildly unscientific. 4. I was curious to see if women were more likely to end up with a The __’s Daughter book than men, either because they chose the title themselves or because their editors chose the title for them. This called for a pie chart. Fig. 2: Is the author of The ___’s Daughter a man or a woman? Sometimes it's impossible to tell. There are authors who use initials instead of given names and maintain minimal web presences. 5. What I found the most startling, aside from the sheer numbers, was the range of occupations, people, crimes, social classes, mythologies and attributes represented in these titles. I’m familiar with The General’s Daughter, for instance, but The Martian General’s Daughter was new to me. The identities of these daughters’ parents ranged from the relatively mundane (The Taxi Driver’s Daughter) to the wildly unexpected (The Eiffel Tower’s Daughter). When I looked over the list, certain patterns began to emerge. I started grouping titles into categories. Some categories — academics, servants, cartographers/explorers, and political activists, for instance — turned out to be quite small, just a handful of titles in each. On the other hand, the daughters of artists and artisans— lace-makers, musicians, painters, calligraphers — were particularly well-represented, as were the daughters of people connected to royalty (dukes, kings), and magical and/or supernatural entities (devils, centaurs, demons). A great many parents represented on the list are politicians (e.g., The Senator’s Daughter, The Governor’s Daughter), or involved in the church (The Bishop’s Daughter, The Vicar’s Daughter). There are in fact several Vicar’s Daughters. Prevailing trends in jacket art suggest that they’re especially fond of low-cut blouses, but that’s neither here nor there. Then there’s a large group of parents that’s villainous and/or on the wrong side of the law (The Outlaw’s Daughter, The Killer’s Daughter), followed by a group employed as laborers (The Miner’s Daughter), and a group that’s affiliated with the military (The Admiral’s Daughter, The Colonel’s Daughter). A lot of them work with animals (The Rancher’s Daughter), are possibly metaphorical (The Sun’s Daughter), work in medicine (The Emergency Doctor’s Daughter), or are employed in retail (The Merchant’s Daughter). The retailers are followed by three groups of exactly the same size: parents who do pseudo-sciencey things like astrology and alchemy (I’ll let you guess these titles), parents in law enforcement or the judiciary (The Sheriff’s Daughter, The Judge’s Daughter), and parents who are keepers of either inns or lighthouses. The last significant group involves parents who, to put the matter as delicately as possible, probably weren’t married when their daughter was conceived (The Harlot’s Daughter, The Mistress’s Daughter). But in case you skimmed these past few paragraphs, I have a graph for this too. Fig. 3: Who are her parents?
Essays Notable Articles
| 1 book mentioned 93 8 min read
Lists

The Notables: 2009

Lists
November 27, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 1
This year’s New York Times Notable Books of the Year list is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Sticking with the fiction exclusively, it appears that we touched upon a few of these books as well: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (a most anticipated book) Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (my review, Millions Top Ten book) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (a most anticipated book, The Millions Interview with Dan Chaon, Best of the Millennium Longlister) Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (a most anticipated book, The Kakutani Two-Step) Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson (Jean Thompson on Edward P. Jones) Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill (Best of the Millennium Longlister) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Wells Tower's Year in Reading, a most anticipated book, my review, Best of the Millennium Longlister, Millions Top Ten book) A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (a most anticipated book, Edan's review) Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers (a most anticipated book) In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Manil Suri's Year in Reading selection, National Book Award Finalist) Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips (National Book Award Finalist) Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (a most anticipated book, my review, National Book Award Winner) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Booker Shortlister) Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Lion, The Witch and Ishiguro) Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (a most anticipated book) The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips (Anne's review, Arthur Phillips' Year in Reading, Arthur Phillips on Kelly Link) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Booker Prize Winner) Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (a most anticipated book)
Lists
| 1 book mentioned 1
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