The book trailer is out for Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace — it features a brief cameo from yours truly. The book’s opening paragraphs appeared on our site this week, too.
Every Love Story Gets a Book Trailer
Choose Your Highsmith!
The fine folks at Norton have made all of Patricia Highsmith’s books available in eBook format, and to celebrate the move, they’ve crafted a website dedicated to the author’s work. Choose Your Highsmith features a recommendation engine while will instantly pick a Highsmith book to match your selected criteria. There’s also a great video in which Alison Bechdel, Robert Weil (Highsmith’s editor at Norton), Joan Schenkar (Highsmith’s biographer), and Terry Castle share their love for the author of the Mr. Ripley series.
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The Teacher
Although Jon Fosse is not well known in America, his work is revered in his native Norway, where he stands on a par with his onetime student and American celebrity, Karl Ove Knausgaard. In a piece for The Paris Review Daily, Damion Searls argues for Fosse’s relevance, claiming that Fosse is the only writer whose work made him weep as he translated it. You could also read Jonathan Callahan on Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
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Barnes & Noble to Go the Way of Borders
According to a report for The Wall Street Journal (paywall), Barnes & Noble will be lessening its floor space allotted to traditional books in order to make way for more Nook displays. Over at Melville House’s blog, MobyLives, publisher Dennis Johnson speculates that this move could signify the end of the road for Barnes & Noble as a bookseller.
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Then I Go To Bed
Want to know how the other side is living? Here’s a detailed look at how hotel consultant and noted historian Stanley Turkel spends his Sundays.
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Prophet Asimov
It’s 2014, but we still don’t have self-driving cars despite Isaac Asimov’s predictions. In 1964, Asimov contemplated what the world would be like 50 years later. He was fairly accurate according to David Wogan at Scientific American. “Asimov got a lot right…about how technology keeps advancing at a rapid clip, freeing humans from mundane and routine tasks. It’s the Google-fication of everything.”
“Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud.”
Are you still not following Pentametron, even after I urged you to do so last week? (And even after New York Magazine added it to its Approval Matrix?) Well, if that’s the case, I shouldn’t even share Earwickr with you. You don’t deserve to read Finnegans Wake spelled out on your Twitter timeline, 140 characters at a time. (Bonus: Michael Chabon reviews James Joyce’s final work for The New York Review of Books.)