James Gleick, writing for the New York Review of Books, looks at how the Library of Congress has begun “stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it” in order to create a modern-day “library of Babel.” I’ll admit that it sounds insane to collect the tweets of ~500 million users, so instead I offer an alternative. Let’s just record everything RT’d by Pentametron2013 for posterity, eh?
Cataloguing Twitter (Or Just the Very Best)
Rainy Day Books
Someone left a manuscript out in the rain. On their tumblr blog, Doubleday Books share two pictures of their offices repurposed to dry it out.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Plumly; Nakamura; Carroll; Waite; Kooser; Carrère; Berryman
Out this week: The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly; Last Winter We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura; Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll; Sometimes the Wolf by Urban Waite; Splitting an Order by the former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser; Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère; and The Heart Is Strange by John Berryman, which I wrote about as part of our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Urvashi Butalia on Indian Small Presses
Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali For Women, in 1984. In 2003, they parted ways to start their own projects: Menon began Women Unlimited; Butalia founded Zubaan Books. Now, in a compressed and edited interview for Mint, Butalia discusses some of the challenges she faces in India’s publishing ecosystem, and also notes, “in my 40 years in publishing, things have never felt as exciting as they are now. It truly seems there are infinite possibilities.”
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Finding Your Story
“Memoirism is perfect if you’re new to autobiographical writing and want an easy and enjoyable way to tell your story without necessarily having to live it. The software allows you to create memories that appear up to 99% accurate, so you can focus on your home, school, or work.” On a revolutionary new writing tool.
Russian Slapstick
“Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.” Ian Frazier writes about the strange humor of Daniil Kharms for the New York Review of Books.
What Do Celebs Read?
Books from their own imprint we hope. “In the last decade, in fact, the celebrity imprint has become something of a cottage industry, an endeavor mutually beneficial to publishing houses in pursuit of stars and their lucrative fanbases and celebrities looking for another feather in their cap.” Some of the celebrities on this list might surprise you, read on to learn about which ones have a publishing imprint.