Jim Romenesko’s page dedicated to humorous typos might be the best Pinterest board ever created.
A Proofreader’s Value Summed Up
Tuesday New Release Day: Jensen, Cole, Haslett, Shields
Out this week is a highly touted seafaring debut We the Drowned. This book in translation is by Danish writer Carsten Jensen. Another debut effort arriving this week is Open City by Teju Cole, which PW likened to Coetzee, Sebald, and Nicholson Baker. Out in paperback today are Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic and controversial Millions Hall of Famer Reality Hunger by David Shields.
Very Secret and Odd
Recommended Reading: Søren Kierkegaard and Anna Akhmatova overheard whispering on a stairwell.
●
●
80 Books You Can Read If You Want To
Last week, I told you about Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Eighty Books No Woman Should Read,” which is a tongue-in-cheek riff on Esquire’s “80 Books Every Man Must Read” list. Now, here’s a fascinating rebuttal from Electric Literature in which Sigal Samuel ponders what might be gained by reading sexist old white guys.
Smuggling Ulysses
Ulysses: The one book that publishers (and Joyce himself) desperately wanted to be confiscated - all in an effort to confront censorship, of course. Mental Floss has the full story.
●
●
(Winds of) Winter is Coming.
Get your mind right ahead of the Game of Thrones Season 4 premiere by reading this just-released chapter of George R. R. Martin’s sixth Song of Ice and Fire installment, Winds of Winter. Martin told fans in a recent blog post, “The new chapter is actually an old chapter. But no, it's not one I've published or posted before.”
The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world."