Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
.literature
Bookstores: Aquatic and Secret
In Karen Russell‘s Swamplandia!, there is an enchanting place known as the abandoned Library Boat. “It held a cargo of books,” Ava Bigtree explains, “In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged, undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors.” Now something similar has moored in England’s canals. And, across the Atlantic, one New Yorker is keeping his own open secret.
A Shortlister in Our Midst
Big congratulations to Millions staffer Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel The Singer’s Gun was shortlisted for the Indie Booksellers Choice Award!
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Invitation to a Beheading
“The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.”
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Animated Russian Classics
Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala spent three years working on his half-hour-long expressionistic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the result is a “destructive animation” that’s at once unnerving and beautiful. However in case you’re more pressed for time, you can also get your animated Russian literature fix by checking out Natalia Berezovaya and Svetlana Petrova’s two-minute-long animation for Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
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The Death of the Camera
“Camera-equipped smartphones are now in spitting distance of outnumbering traditional cameras in the percentage of photos and videos taken with them,” according to analyst NPD Group.
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