Marxman
Roald Dahl and the Hilariously Bad Grades
A newly released Roald Dahl collection, The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets, includes a secret ending to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and excerpts from the author’s hilariously bad report cards. Wrote one teacher about Dahl in 1931: “A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.” (via Galley Cat)
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For Tom Waits, Drink Everything
Do you like listening to music, but often struggle with an appropriate drink order? Enter Drinkify, a website which suggests cocktails based on the tunes you’re playing. (I tested it out with The Wu-Tang Clan. It told me to drink “1 bottle of gin.” Do with this information what you must.)
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All Toured Out
There are book tours and then there are book tours. You either get the full-scale, all-expenses-paid treatment from your publisher, or else you get a request to plan it all and pay for it all yourself. In the weeks after his latest novel came out, our own Bill Morris set off on a DIY tour — all driving, no flying — about which he’s been writing dispatches for The Daily Beast. This week, he thinks about the changing nature of book promotion, recounts his nights in dumpy motels and compares his experience to that of our own Edan Lepucki. (FYI, they talked about writing their novels in a Millions piece.)