Once again, the old “who pays writers?” debate, this time courtesy of The Atlantic. Further reading: “Writers should be paid $1 million per article.”
Who Pays?
Hawthorne and Melville
“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale.” On Herman Melville’s love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Pair with a review of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.
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Tuesday New Release Day: French; Lerner; Finnegan; Iyer; Antrim; Mitchell
New this week: The Secret Place by Tana French; 10:04 by Ben Lerner; Barbarian Days by William Finnegan; Wittgenstein, Jr. by Lars Iyer; The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim; and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
“The internet breeze”
To celebrate National Poetry Month, McSweeney’s is publishing daily haikus by the poet Dan Chelotti.
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Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.
Semicolon Shenanigans
Need to spice up your writing? Try one of McSweeney’s punctuation marks such as the Yellow-Winged Apostrophe, which likes “to ‘peace out’ of its obligation to indicate possession or contraction,” or the Academic Ellipsis, which “is used by those who wish to demonstrate just how much more they know about how to use ellipses than you do.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers, Dubus, Freeman, Boyd, Zoller-Seitz
New this week: The Circle by Dave Eggers; Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III; How to Read a Novelist by former Granta editor John Freeman; Solo, a new James Bond novel by William Boyd; and “the first in-depth overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography” by the New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller-Seitz.
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Highly Recommended
The New York Times recommends eight new books it thinks you’ll like, including Alan Moore‘s Jerusalem, which we reviewed last month, and two novels – Jonathan Lethem‘s A Gambler’s Anatomy, and Jade Chang‘s The Wangs vs. the World – that were on our own most-anticipated October list.
Getting You Back on Your Feet
If you get bored on your daily commute, you might want to look at Derive, an app that generates random routes that give you new perspectives on your city. As The Common founder (and Millions contributor) Jennifer Acker puts it: “Let the French show you how to walk.”
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