Melville House has one of the short stories from Tao Lin’s Bed up for your noontime reading pleasure.
“Life was not cake.”
Internet Tendency, Redesigned
The charmingly lo-fi McSweeney's website gets a redesign and manages to stay charmingly lo-fi.
Personal Space
Sometimes, in a narrative, it’s necessary to focus on one scene, in one place, for as long as one possibly can. In his new graphic novel, Here, Richard McGuire takes this to an extreme, setting the entirety of the story in one corner of a character’s living room. In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews the new book.
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Writers and Their Books
Equal parts voyeuristically indulgent and unapologetically stimulating, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books is the second installment in Yale University Press’s ongoing series, a journey into the personal libraries of thirteen favorite authors. This installment? Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Díaz, Rebecca Goldstein, and more.
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Controversial Books
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the most controversial books of all time.
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“Dressed to the nines, ready for the first martini”
Next time you wait for your date to finish getting ready, occupy yourself with a poem.
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Fancy Yourself a Bowdlerizer
"Books can be dangerous objects–under their influence people start to wonder, dream, and think." In "celebration" of Banned Book Week, the New York Public Library has a quiz for you to find out how much you know about the freedom to read. See also our tribute to The Bluest Eye, one of the United States' most challenged books.
Murakami Controversy
Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood has been dropped from one New Jersey school's syllabus due to "some words and language that seemed to be inappropriate as far as the parents and some of the kids were concerned." His publisher A. A. Knopf has issued a statement in response.