Comedy Central will team up with Running Press to launch a joint publishing venture called Comedy Central Books. Their first title will be a “holiday themed novelty book” by Denis Leary. Fun Fact: Leary is Conan O’Brien’s third cousin.
Comedy Central Books
Up Next, Ice-Nine
Cat’s Cradle‘s Felix Hoenikker would be so proud: Stanford scientists have found a way to make a dense, extraterrestrial ice called Ice VII (via The Rumpus). See also: “2 B R 0 2 B”, a “lost” Vonnegut story that first appeared in the sci-fi journal Worlds of If in January 1962.
●
●
The Benefits of Reading
Infographic of the Week: The Benefits of Reading presented by the National Reading Campaign at Electric Literature. Carolyn Ross, a New Jersey high school teacher, discusses how to make reading more enjoyable for students.
Make You Feel
Robert Birnbaum interviews Cynthia Ozick at The Morning News. “Fiction shouldn’t say something, it should make you feel.” If you want to read more from Ozick, check out our interview with her.
●
●
The Deletionist
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
Someone’s Gotta Do It
If you’ve ever wondered how all those celebrity chefs can churn out so many cookbooks year after year, you should check out Julia Moskin’s confessions from a former “food ghost.”
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Hunt; Gerrard; Molina; Osborne; Jacobson; Greer
Out this week: The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt; The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard; Like A Fading Shadow by Antonio Muñoz Molina; Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne; The Dog’s Last Walk by Howard Jacobson; and Less by Andrew Sean Greer. For more on these and other new titles, go read our just-published book preview.