If you’re on the East Coast and still have power, don’t let Sandy ruin your Halloween – feast your eyes on these vintage horror paperback covers, instead. Stay safe!
Computer of Horrors
PEN World Voices Festival
I spent last weekend as a correspondent for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. As such, I covered two events for the organization: Friday night’s ninth annual Translation Slam and Sunday afternoon’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture featuring Sonia Sotomayor. (I also submitted a pretty sweet author photograph, if I do say so myself.) For full multimedia coverage of the entire festival, check out the PEN Live Tumblr.
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Curiosities: Listmania
W.W. Norton puts together a project similar to our Year in Reading (and with some participants in common): Writers Recommend.Another clever batch of recommendations: Village Voice asks several notables to recommend their favorite "obscure" books.Three Percent reveals its 25-book longlist for the "Best Translated Book of 2008" (Bonus Link: The Prizewinners: International Edition)A conversation with South African poet and anti-apartheid activist Breyten BreytenbachTodd Zuniga's (of Opium Magazine and Literary Death Match) "favorite writers we haven't heard of yet."Best book cover designs of the year. (via 3% and kottke)Maud reproduces the memo behind the huge reorganization at Random House (which itself is just one part of the belt tightening hitting the publishing industry in recent weeks.)
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You May Call Me Bobby, Or You May Call Me Zimmy
In more "Dylan at 70" news, the knowledgeable Ed Ward reviews the compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan for The Oxford American. (Editor's Note: The omission from this album of Nina Simone's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and Ben E. King's "Lay Lady Lay" are both unconscionable.)
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Move Over, Paula Deen
The late Colonel Harland Sanders (of Kentucky Fried Chicken notoriety) is the author of a newly unearthed manuscript "chock full of homespun anecdotes and life lessons from Sanders, who struck it rich late in life. It also includes a heaping helping of his favorite personal recipes." The manuscript will be published online within the next year.
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“No writer needs to be all the writers all the time”
Zadie Smith in conversation with Édouard Louis for the Document Journal. "Listening to the novelists Édouard Louis and Zadie Smith in conversation inspires a kind of hushed glee, a bliss familiar to eavesdroppers who encounter sublime discourse. " How can you resist?
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