Our own Mark O’Connell has an excellent piece over on The New Yorker‘s books blog detailing his propensity to abandon burritos books, even good ones, halfway through.
Finish that book. Finish that burrito.
Slightly Off
Expats of all stripes have trouble defining the word “home,” which is true even when the expat is someone like James Wood, who left England for America in the ‘90s and set up a life for himself in Massachusetts. In the LRB, he describes the odd pain of emigration, lamenting that his “English reality” has faded into memory. (You could also read Charles Finch on trying to live up to Wood’s standards.)
●
●
Cockroaches in Skinny Jeans
Is that an iPod Nano? And a fixed gear bike? Uh-oh: you might have hipsters (via).
Photographic Thaw
If you’re going to accidentally leave almost two dozen unprocessed photo negatives out for 100 years, there’s no better place to store them than a block of ice in Antarctica. Conservationists restoring an Antarctic exploration hut found the negatives left from Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal 1910-13 Terre Nova Expedition to the South Pole. For a less harrowing tale of Arctic exploration, check out our review of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
That’s A Wrap, Says Alice Munro
Alice Munro announced her retirement from writing this week. “Perhaps, when you’re my age,” she told a National Post reporter, “you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be.” Previously the Canadian author announced her retirement in 2006, but that didn’t stop her from publishing two more books – including her latest story collection, Dear Life (Millions review). The uninitiated can get a primer on her entire oeuvre by checking out our comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro. See also: “Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways”
●
●
The YOLO Pages
This month, Boost House is publishing what the New Yorker describes as “the first English-language paperbound anthology of Alt Lit and its siblings weird Twitter … and Flarf.” The collection – The YOLO Pages – features work by Steve Roggenbuck, Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, and (of course) @Horse_ebooks among others. But far from being a compendium of “vomit jokes and image macros of cats,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith, the book also contains poems “that obliquely grapple with bigger issues of morality, politics, feminism, capitalism, and the environment.”
Jason Epstein on How Publishing Works
“Far more than any other medium, books contain civilizations, the ongoing conversation between present and past. Without this conversation we are lost. But books are also a business….” Jason Epstein explains how publishing works—and why, increasingly, it doesn’t, at the New York Review of Books. (via)
●
●