Jessica Probus’ send-up of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is brilliant. I present The YOLO Wallpaper.
“Better yet, Carpe Wallpaper.”
Bent Relics of Adolescence
Don DeLillo has a new short story in The New Yorker, about a teenage boy in the midst of his parents’ divorce. Delillo spoke with Deborah Treisman about the character’s obsession with words and how he sees his identity in light of his parents’.
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Custom Litographs
Litographs is a Massachusetts-based company that uses literature as inspiration for their designs. The text becomes the basis for the design. (Check out this example for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) They’re launching a new Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday in which you can make a custom Litograph with whatever text you want. Pretty cool, right?
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Copyeditors Required
“On Thursday, an uncorrected proof of her debut novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with the writer’s name was misspelled as “JA Rowling”, became the muddled copy to fetch four figures at auction.” The Guardian presents a survey of famous literary typos and malapropisms. See also our own Edan Lepucki‘s interview with her beloved copyeditor Susan Bradanini Betz.
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Global Fame for a Literary Icon
“She told the students not to explain too much, that they could throw in expressions in Igbo or Yoruba or pidgin and trust the reader to get it. She told them that even if a story was autobiographical it should be shaped—that, for instance, although in life you could have ten close friends, in fiction you could not, because it was too confusing. She told them to avoid inflated language—’never purchase when you can buy.'” A delightful (and somewhat rare) long profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker.
Book Discoverability
Millions staff writer Patrick Brown put together a case study (featuring graphs!) on how books get “discovered.” Spoiler alert: there’s no “magic bullet.”
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