We know you’re eagerly following our Year in Reading series, but we want you to participate, too! Our own Nick Moran has got the details up in a gif-filled Tumblr post.
D-I-Y #YiR12
In Good Standing
This one goes out to all you procrastinators out there. A woman in Auckland, New Zealand has just returned a library book (Myths and Legends of Maoriland) a cool sixty-seven years late–she had “been meaning to return it” for decades. Hopefully she didn’t leave any boogers.
Across Space and Time
“These sorts of connections are at the centre of nearly all time machine fiction. These novels usually draw attention to telling commonalities across historical eras, or between the past and the present. That gives an engaging puzzle quality to the books—we read seeking out the dropped clues that will shed light on the purpose of the parallel.” On fiction in which the plot takes place over multiple timelines.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Domini; Straight; Davis
New this week: The Best of McSweeney’s; a new e-book edition of Highway Trade by John Domini; and new paperback editions of Between Heaven and Here by Susan Straight and Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis. (You could also read Susan Straight’s Millions essay on Toni Morrison’s Sula.)
Strolling Story
Recommended Reading: Lydia Davis’s new short story, “Old Men Around Town,” in the New Statesman. “He stops to tell us that he must be up early in the morning – to get down to the factory. The factory is gone, his men are gone, but he still seems to be in charge of something.” For more Davis, check out her new collection.
Chris Ware’s Radical Honesty
Hannah Means-Shannon shares a dispatch from the Rocky Mountain Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in which Building Stories author (and Year in Reading alum) Chris Ware discusses his creative processes.
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Appearing Elsewhere
A few days ago, Amazon announced the launch of their new “@Author” feature for the Kindle, whereby readers can click on an e-book passage and ask the author questions about it directly. I’ve broken out in a cold poststructuralist sweat about this over on The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog.
Economics of the E-Book
The Wall Street Journal reports how literary authors are feeling the pinch in the age of e-books: “The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.”
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