There are a lot of funny and silly GIF blogs out there, but what if you’re more “serious-minded?” What if you want something more fulfilling out of 2012’s “Word of the Year?” Well, you’re in luck.
GIFs Can Be Serious, Too
Positively Freudian
Chances are that your mental image of Pavlov is that of a man giving commands to a barking dog. However, as a new biography makes clear, the doctor who brought us his very own adjective has a far more complicated legacy. In The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about the man behind the bell.
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St. Crispin’s Day is Here Again
Today is St. Crispin’s Day, a day immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V when the title character rallied his British “band of brothers” to face their French adversaries. And according to Guy Patrick Cunningham, “there are lots of ways we can celebrate it.”
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Charlie and the Chocolate Bookstore
Chocolate can cure a lot of things but what about the ailing bookstore? Belgian researchers have found that bookstores that smell like chocolate boost sales, especially of romance novels. What about bacon?
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A Budding Fan
In 1964, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin wrote Marvel icon Stan Lee a fan letter.
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One Book, Two Covers
“What do these two books have in common?…Open each cover and you will only find similarities: They are the same book.” For The Globe and Mail, our own Claire Cameron writes about one book being marketed with two different covers and titles to appeal to different audiences. Pair with: an essay about book covers featuring headless, backless women, and another on the beauty of typewritten book covers.
Tuesday New Release Day: Moore, Danticat, Wright, Loyd
Out this week: The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore; Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat; F, a new book of poems by Franz Wright; and The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd, which Katie Rogin reviewed for us last week. For more on these and other interesting titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
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Amazon responds to Hachette furor
Amazon, whose tense negotiations with Hachette in the past months have led them to slow ship-times for its books, offered last night “to fund 50% of an author pool—to be allocated by Hachette—to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%.” Of course, Hachette may find calculating and allocating damages awkward so soon after authors flexed their social-media muscle. Sidebar: Amazon claimed “989 of 1000” items sold would be unaffected by this continuing “business interruption,” which might mean a full 1.1 percent of their business comes from just one mid-sized traditional publisher—heartening news from an unlikely source.
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