To celebrate National Poetry Month, McSweeney’s is publishing daily haikus by the poet Dan Chelotti.
“The internet breeze”
Nabokov Speech Published in English for the First Time
In 1925 Nabokov delivered a colorful talk on boxing to a circle of Russian émigrés living in Berlin. Yesterday, that pugnacious passage was published for the first time in English.
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Jim Crace Takes Home the IMPAC Award
Three cheers for Jim Crace, who just took home the 20th annual IMPAC Dublin Literary Award! If you remember our coverage of the shortlist, you’ll know that the Harvest author beat out TransAtlantic author Colum McCann and Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others.
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Too Many Nevers
A new study out of Stony Brook University employs a complex statistical model to figure out what makes a book successful. Judging books on the basis of Amazon sales, awards won and Project Gutenberg downloads, the scientists determined that successful books have a higher-than-average ratio of self-references, prepositions and coordinating conjunctions. Unsuccessful books, on the other hand? A high ratio of adverbs and location markers.
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Nerdist Wilco
A Nerdist podcast featuring Wil Wheaton and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in which Tweedy discusses his path to becoming a musician, how his kids like having “a rockstar for a dad,” and lets listeners in on their sound check at The Wiltern? Well, there goes your Monday afternoon.
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“Signs and Symbols” For Teh Internets
“If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not!… Still farther away, great mountains of data mining sum up, in zeroes and ones, the ultimate truth of his being.” KA Semënova updates Nabokov‘s short story “Signs and Sumbols” (and works by other famous Russian authors) for McSweeney’s, “teh internets” and the digital world.
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