Amidst the tragic news that Iain Banks has cancer, The Telegraph responds with a headline for the ages: “Iain Banks taught me that books can be a hand grenade“
Lob One for Iain
Book and Bed
Who’s ready for a trip to Tokyo? Sadie Stein at The Paris Review breaks the lid on a veritable Shangri-La for book lovers, a quasi-bunkhouse known as Book and Bed. Book and Bed is a bunkhouse-slash-bookstore that doesn’t actually sell books. Instead, they have a number of rather spartan beds built inside row after row of bookshelves. Their noble goal is also a simple one; to offer “an experience shared by everyone at least once: the blissful instant of falling asleep while reading.”
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Early Bird
Ready to feel bad about yourself? Good: a writer named Daisy Ashford wrote her first novel — a 1919 bestseller — when she was nine years old.
“An American train can’t help but dream of the West”
Recommended Reading: this graphic short story by Ben Nadler and Alyssa Berg.
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The Audio Revolution
Audiobooks: the next revolution in publishing? The Year in Reading entries from Julia Fierro and Michelle Huneven, both of whom won the “The Gutenberg Award for Time-Saving Technology” in our yearly round-up, may point to “yes”.
The Plagiarist
“How I wish he’d stuck to being himself. Instead, he chose to be me.” How it feels to have one’s poetry plagiarized.
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