At the helm of The Paris Review‘s advice column this week, Sasha Frere-Jones describes Sheila Heti‘s How Should a Person Be ? as the inverse of Elaine Dundy‘s The Dud Avacado.
A person should not be a dud avacado?
‘Tis the Season…
If your honey-bun doesn’t need another iPod or bottle of perfume this Christmas, consider Heifer International, a non-profit that lets you give the gift of heifers, sheep, goats, bees, rabbits, or water buffalo.
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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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“We love sentences and the people who create them.”
Christopher Newgent set up Vouched as a way to reinvigorate the book selling dynamic. By setting up guerrilla book stores and launching his Vouched Presents series, he’s had some success. You can keep tabs on their Twitter account to see when they’ll stop by your area.
Take Your Vitamins
Did Gollum have a vitamin D deficiency? In the Medical Journal of Australia, Joseph A. Hopkinson and Nicholas S. Hopkinson posit that the Lord of the Rings saga could’ve been prevented had the inhabitants of Middle Earth just gotten a little more sunlight. “Systematic textual analysis of The Hobbit supports our initial hypothesis that the triumph of good over evil may be assisted to some extent by the poor diet and lack of sunlight experienced by the evil characters.”
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Next Up, the Auckland Teal
As part of their ongoing efforts to monopolize all kinds of waterfowl, the good folks at Penguin, headed by the editor Jonathan Bell, have dug up old covers from the company’s defunct imprint, Pelican. The Guardian set up a slideshow that lets you scroll through a selection.
It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus‘s The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.” When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.