This list of the year’s best book covers — chosen by the staff of Design Observer — pairs nicely with our own comparison of book covers from the US and UK.
Insert Your Own “Judging” Joke Here
Type Wars
For everyone who likes typography and arguments, New York Magazine has a story up that covers the type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones and follows the pair through their success to their ultimate rift. For those who prefer debates with more immediate impact, Mental Floss has a breakdown of the best shots fired in the fight over the Oxford Comma.
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Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.
Mocha Dick
The (mostly) true story behind Moby-Dick gets the picture-book treatment in Mocha Dick: The Legend and the Fury.
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David Simon to Adapt MLK Biography for HBO Miniseries
The Wire and Treme creator David Simon tells The Baltimore Sun that he’s going to work on an HBO miniseries about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The project will be based on Taylor Branch’s multi-part biographies of the civil rights leader.
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Retrofitted
Ever wondered exactly what “mod” is? A new book by Richard Weight (reviewed in The Guardian yesterday) sets out to answer that question.
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Contemporary Fiction and the Internet
"The internet has altered our lives in ways television never did or could, but mainstream literary novelists – by which I mean writers who specialize in realistic, character-based narratives – have mostly shied away from writing about this, perhaps hoping that, like TV, it could be safely ignored." Laura Miller examines how contemporary novels are coming to terms with the internet.
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