The wonderful folks at Harper Perennial are giving away a free PDF of forty short stories from the likes of Adam Wilson, Blake Butler, Roxane Gay, Kyle Minor, and many more. On July 17th, the group will also release Forty Stories as a free eBook through “all the major retailers,” too.
Forty Stories
Neomysterativity
The term “academic writing” is controversial, not least because it implies that academics have an odd and persnickety way of writing. In a blog post for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman examines the genre, looking back on his time in grad school to argue that academic writing is a “fraught and mysterious thing.”
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JJS to LARB
“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?” asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. “He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.”
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From Flesh to Wafer to Cash
Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the communion wafer’s place in free-market capitalism.
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Epic Fail
When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
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Best Food Books
Food writing fans: In the Chicago Tribune, several top chefs name their favorite books about food. (Thanks Laurie)
Thanks for plugging this, Nick!
D