Amazon’s attempts to control literary domain names like “.book” and “.read” are not making the publishing community happy.
.literature
A Little Day in the Life
“To Yanagihara, the commitment to journalism is a vital expression of the practical side of her nature: she likes the adrenaline of short deadlines and the satisfaction of making a new product each week.” The Guardian profiles Hanya Yanagihara about her life, fiction, and day job as the editor of T magazine, the New York Times style supplement. From our archives: The Millions’ interview with the acclaimed novelist.
Yellow Is the New Black
Yellow book covers are on the rise as publishers push for bold designs that pop for online shoppers. Also check out this comparison of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
19th Century Gifs
When University of Iowa Special Collections librarian Colleen Theisen found hidden fore-edge paintings on a 19th century scientific book Autumn, she made a gif of it, of course. Then, she realized there were more secret paintings for each season and more gifs followed. Who said old books weren’t interactive?
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Custodian of Forgotten Books
Recommended Reading: On Brad Bigelow, a “Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Our own Claire Cameron traces the history of John Williams’s Stoner, which was first published in 1965 and became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013.
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B|ta’arof Launches A Poetry Series
B|ta’arof – which launched last year – announced a new poetry series featuring translations of “contemporary poems written in Persian and translated into English by emerging poets and scholars in the Iranian diaspora.” The translations will be accompanied by brief interviews with the translators, each consisting of the same five questions. “The idea,” according to the mission statement, “is to pull back the curtain on the process of translation, revealing how it is subject to individual choices and proclivities—the first choice being what poem to even translate.”
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Reading Your Way to Sochi
Another day, another LARB piece about reading Russian fiction in conjunction with the Winter Olympics. (One particularly interesting earlier installment is over here.) Meanwhile, I offer a compendium of passages from the Russian masters, and use my favorite #SochiFails to illustrate them.
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