On DJ Mad Eskimo, Tumivut, Eskimocentricity, and Tagoona

Recommended Reading: “Out in the Great Alone,” Brian Phillips’s epic report from the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Have we entered into the age of New Modernism? Better yet, what does “New Modernism” even mean? Let regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark explain it to you in his essay for LitHub on George Saunders, Alexandra Kleeman, and experimental feeling. This Millions review of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? is particularly relevant.

Boss Fight Books is a new series in the mold of the classic 33 1/3 model. In lieu of covering music albums, however, each Boss Fight book “will take a critical, creative, historical, and personal look at a single classic video game.” The first titles in the series will investigate Earthbound and Galaga, and they should be out by next December and January, respectively.

In the 1880s, a group of rural Illinoisans formed a Christian sect that believed that a local woman, Dorinda Beekman, was the new Jesus Christ. When Mrs. Beekman died, a follower of hers claimed that her spirit lived inside him; as the new leader of the sect, he moved his followers into a barn and named it Heaven. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Visel looks back on this odd chapter of history, as well as the novel it inspired. (Related: Eric Shonkwiler on the literature of the Midwest.)

More lists of the top books of 2009 are coming out. Now up: Amazon’s favorites. Tops on their list is Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, recently named a National Book Award finalist.

This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.