Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
.literature
The Deep Also Impacts
Those of you out there who grew up in the 90s will remember that every disaster movie brought a slew of novelizations into bookstores. Even if the movie in question did badly, you knew that at least two adaptations of the script would pop up on shelves. At Hazlitt, Will Sloan wonders if the age of the novelization is over.
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America the Beautiful in Books
“Now I wrote until near dawn, wanting a map of the literary nation, a beautiful evocation of how we are truly a nation of village and city and prairie and brownstone, of Rockies and bayous and mesas. Novels give to every reader someone else’s home. Can we not see this – we of wonder and grievance?” Susan Straight creates a map of America in 737 novels, prompting us to remember the perennial literary question: What is the greatest American novel?
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Celebrity Memoir Overdose
John Harris at Guardian looks at what reading 11 celebrity memoirs in four days will do to your brain.
The Relevance of Plasma
The vigilant excavators at Longform have dug up a fairly old piece, written by the essayist Jo Ann Beard, on a time in her life taken up by cagey dogs, vanishing husbands and the plasma in Saturn’s rings.
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That Was How He Was
“The last line of Saul Bellow’s ‘A Single Dish’ is nothing like poetry. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep.” Ethan Canin at The Atlantic on how Saul Bellow packs so much emotion into a single sentence. Here are a couple Bellow-related Millions links for your perusing pleasure.
OWS Drummers Quiet Down
Last night at the General Assembly, the working group of drummers, Pulse, in a spirit of conciliation and generosity, brought forward a proposal to limit their drumming from 12 to 2 and 4 to 6 pm only.
Colum McCann’s Soccer Verse
Major League Soccer put together a nice video to accompany the audio of Colum McCann reading his poem, “Robbie Keane.”
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Wake Up Lucid
For your consideration: “A Minor,” (mp3) the first single from the emerging LA band Wake Up Lucid. If you like your contemporary rock rootsy, bluesy, and earnest (The Black Keys, Jet, The White Stripes), you might like Wake Up Lucid.
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