Amazon has announced that all seven Harry Potter books will be available via its Kindle Lending Library starting on June 19th.
Borrow Harry Potter Electronically
Patron-Driven Acquisition
Librarians might frown on P.D.A. in the library, that is, Public Displays of Affection by canoodling college couples. But another kind of P.D.A. might bring a different, more welcome sort of disruption to the library: Patron-Driven Acquisition, a model of e-book licensing that aims to relieve library purchasing agents from spending thousands on books nobody will end up reading.
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Visual Stories
If you haven’t seen Knopf art director Chip Kidd’s humorous TED Talk yet, you should really get right on that. He makes a good “visual first impression,” discusses the role of a book designer, the smell of an iPad, and does it all while wearing a “skanky mic.”
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Slate’s New Language Podcast
Word nerds will likely dig Slate’s new language-focused podcast, Lexicon Valley, with Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo.
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Interview with John Darnielle
Recommended viewing: John Darnielle talks about his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, in a video for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Steal Like a Gypsy
The winner of this year’s Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award for fiction is Sofi Stambo. Here’s a rather savage piece of hers over at Guernica Magazine.
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No Moral Order
Recommended Reading: On James Sallis, criminally under-read American crime writer and contemporary paranoid, whose novels we should definitely be talking about.
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“Life, friends, is boring”
“These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses.” At The Rumpus, a memory of falling in love with The Dream Songs (which happens to nicely complement a piece we published back in April).
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