Would you buy your way into a novel? For $900 CDN you can determine the title of Daniel Perlmutter’s next book. If that’s a little steep for ya, $15 gets one of your sentences in there.
Literally crowding the text
Becoming What You Write
Recommended Reading: A conversation between Year in Reading alumna Rebecca Makkai and Louise Erdrich at The Chicago Review of Books. You could also read our interview with Makkai following the release of The Hundred-Year House.
Borrowing Made Easy
A fledgling New York tech firm has invented a new service, Oyster, that the company claims is a lot like Spotify in its workings. Their innovation? The products they’re sharing are books.
“Ultimately just plain nice”
Last week, I followed up the news that “because” may now be used as a preposition by noting that the American Dialect Society had named it their Word of the Year. Now, in The New Republic, John McWhorter argues that the new preposition is used to signal empathy and warmth. (Related: Fiona Maazel on the dangers of bad grammar.)
at once impressionistic and profound
Rohan Maitzen on Virginia Woolf‘s literary criticism: “What—I can imagine her asking herself, as she writes about other novelists—am I doing, what else can I do, with the novel? Surely figuring this out was always, for her, the underlying project of her criticism.”
I Doubt The Authors Would’ve Been Thrilled With This
Deep South Magazine‘s Hunter Murphy compiled a list of “The Greatest Bromances in Southern Literature.”