“Mr. [Mark] O’Connell is an intelligent and very funny writer,” says Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “But Epic Fail will also prompt you to consider how shallow—and ugly—humans can be.” (Bonus: a reference to getting pitted, just so pitted.)
Epic Fail In the Wall Street Journal
Writing the Body
Recommended Reading: E.V. de Cleyre explores the presence of the body in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Fallon, Brown, Sriracha
New this week is a debut collection of loosely linked stories that’s been getting some attention. Military families are the common theme in Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone. Another newly released debut is Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters about a Shakespeare scholar’s three daughters, all named after characters from the Bard’s plays. Also new this week, a tome dedicated to the “hot” condiment of the moment, The Sriracha Cookbook.
Similar-Sounding Names: A Conundrum
For The Atlantic, Nina Martyris examines books that are rife with characters with similar-sounding names, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina.
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Books Nobody Reads
Maybe nobody read your first, or last, most recent or only book, but writer, take heart: nobody read the work of these 10 great authors either.
New Music
The Beatles‘ remastered catalogue is probably the hottest rock release of the moment, but there are other notable new releases this month: The Stone Roses‘ 20th anniversary re-release double CD and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (recently written up at The Millions)’s second full length EP, Higher Than the Stars.
Movie Poster Marketing Philosophy
Have you ever wondered why so many movie posters employ the “tilting horizon” effect? One marketer is here to explain why. Now, if only someone could explain why no movie posters are original anymore…
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The Science of Poetry
The relationship between poetry and science is more inextricably (and historically) linked than you might imagine: “In the late 1700s, scientific treatises were written in poetic form because poetry was considered the language of intellect and the future.”
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