Good Books is an online book retailer that donates all of its proceeds to Oxfam. It’s also a big fan of trippy literary homage. In a collaboration with two creative studios, and without consulting the Hunter S. Thompson or Franz Kafka estates, the group’s released a promo that draws on some of the most “out-there” elements of both writers.
Certainly Got My Attention
Droit ou l’Ordre
Believe it or not, but the widely publicized murder case is not just a modern phenomenon. In 1761, Voltaire became obsessed with the case of Marc-Antoine Calas, a young man who was found dead in his home city of Toulouse. At The Paris Review Daily, a post on the Candide author’s impact on modern justice.
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Hate: Is It In You?
Meghan Daum’s written the longest and best article on “Haterade” you’ll read this month. I guarantee it.
WWII-era NYC… In Living Color
These color photographs of WWII-era New York City may rival those color photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia.
The Future Is Unwritten
It turns out that books by self-publishers and small presses are eating away at the Big Four’s market share. Pair with this series from The Millions about the future of the book.
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Battle Royale
Publishers Weekly did some sleuthing and it turns out that it only takes 300 print copies sold per day to land the Amazon bestseller list – time to get cracking, everyone.
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At Year’s End
“Year-end lists are always subjective and incomplete, but they are especially tricky for books. A dedicated film critic can watch every wide release film and a theater critic can go to most every play, but the book critic is faced with an insurmountable mountain of books each year. The sheer number of books is inspiring as a reader, but it can make “best of” lists laughably subjective when the critic has only read a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of books published each year.” This might help to explain the logic and intent of our own Year in Reading series, but it also prefaces Electric Literature‘s list of the top 25 story collections of 2014 (which includes recent Year in Reading alum Phil Klay‘s Redeployment).
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