David Foster Wallace wrote the best bitter takedown (PDF) of the cruise ship industry ever, but he only had to endure a 7-night vacation. Imagine his horror, then, if he had been forced to spend significant time on The World, a $20,000+/month ship that continuously circumnavigates the world and has permanent passengers in its 165 private residences. For a more detailed glimpse at life on board the ship, check out Anthony Bourdain’s Gourmet piece on his 2003 visit.
“I’m The King of the World!”
Wiki-zon
In a long tradition of online experimentation, Amazon has now started including something called “Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Pages” in its internal search results (see the second result here). Now you can view a copy of Wikipedia pages for authors like David Foster Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Franzen, and probably thousands of others. How can Amazon do this? Wikipedia pages are free for anyone to reuse for almost any purpose, so long as the license info is displayed. Why is Amazon doing this? It wants free content that it can monetize.
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Not All Dads Are Good Dads
Andrew Thurman writes about a literary genre he's particularly invested in: the Bad Dad Memoir, typically written by the offspring of said Bad Dads.
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The Fairy King
Ian Thompson for The Telegraph has written a fantastic, comprehensive piece on the fabulous allure of the Cuban-born, Italian writer Italo Calvino. Head back to The Millions for a couple of pieces on Calvino’s sixth memo and science fiction masterpiece, respectively.
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Is This the Apocalypse?
The day has come. Amazon just announced that it is now selling more e-books than physical books, and its ad-infused “Kindle with Special Offers is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family.” Meanwhile, it’s still news when a well-known author publishes an e-book (in this case, Susan Orlean’s new Kindle Single Animalish).
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Tuesday New Release Day: Atwood; Waters; Turner; Robertson; Wineberg; Tierce; Shapiro; Darnielle
New this week: Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood; The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters; My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner; Wallflowers by Eliza Robertson; On Bittersweet Place by Ronna Wineberg; Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce; In the Red by Elena Mauli Shapiro; and Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Great links. Still can’t believe Gourmet is gone.