“Adolf Hitler loved books—that nasty bent for book burning notwithstanding—and the book industry loves him back. Type his name into Amazon, and while he doesn’t trigger the English-language numbers of Jesus (186,740) or Lincoln (70,710), he registers a solid 18,597—a stunning figure for someone who died less than 70 years ago.” On the Fuhrer’s paradoxical relationship with literature.
Lincoln vs. Hitler
Author Late Night
Where did the authors on late night TV go? They’re all on Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show. At Esquire, Sean Manning pays tribute to Ferguson’s literary tastes by talking to some of the authors who appeared on his show, including Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Sloane Crosley, and more.
Obama’s Books
In support of “Small Business Saturday,” President Obama took his daughters shopping for books at Kramerbooks in D.C. So, which books made it to the register?
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“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
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Beach Reads
From Ian McEwan to Iris Murdoch, The Guardian offers a list of the 10 best seaside novels. Pair with our own Mark O’Connell‘s account of a close encounter with John Banville, whose The Sea makes the #8 spot.
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Fiction or Defamation?
The novel that had Scarlett Johansson filing charges of “fraudulent and illegal exploitation of (her) name” is due out next month in its English-language iteration. The First Thing You See by Grégoire Delacourt is ostensibly about a garage mechanic who ends up falling for a Johansson lookalike. For more on the legality of literature, here’s an essay for The Millions on J.D. Salinger and U.S. copyright.
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My first book, published in 1979, was “With Hitler in New York.” My second book, published in 1982, was “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” As such, I am an expert on the relative popularity of the two men and I would like to report that as far as short story collections are concerned, Hitler outsells Lincoln three to one.
Yikes, how depressing.