Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore just launched a First Editions Club where members get a signed first edition of a new book each month. Some recent selections include: George Saunders’s Tenth of December (our review), Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons (our review), and Philipp Meyer’s The Son.
Get Your First Edition Fix
We’re All Riding With the Ghost
American music lost one of its best songwriters with the passing of Jason Molina last March. Molina was known for his work with Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. As a tribute this week on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and as a way of spreading awareness for a May 11 concert in Molina’s memory, Band of Horses covered one of the late musician’s songs, “I’ve Been Riding With the Ghost.” (Original.)
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The House of Black Is For Sale
Joining the Order of the Phoenix might cost you. The Movoto Real Estate blog priced 12 Grimmauld Place at $3,685,500 (we're unsure of the price in galleons, gnuts, and sickles.) In the past, the company has estimated prices for Hogwarts and The Burrow. Evidently, you need as much money as J.K. Rowling to live in the wizarding world.
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Why?
Jesse Eisenberg’s nephew has a few questions for him in The New Yorker. Listen to Eisenberg read a piece of his new book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, and face existential doubt in Shouts and Murmurs.
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Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt's textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, "I sighed." We're sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.
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Debt and David Graeber
Anthropologist and Melville House author David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand economic trends. The author's book is so great and topical that it's earned a profile in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
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How Badly Do You Want this Job?
How would you respond if someone asked you, "If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?" during a job interview? At The Morning News, Giles Turnbull tried to answer the weirdest job interview questions. His answer to the question: "What in the name of God would I be doing counting unsold bottles in a liquor store? Are you trying to fuck with my mind?"
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Thursday Links
Bud offers a charming man about town piece that touches on the intersection of technology and culture.One of my biggest on-the-job challenges back when I was a bookseller was recommending books for finicky teenagers. In an effort to take some of the guesswork out of this endeavor, Anita Silvey, a professor of children's literature at Simmons College in Boston, wrote 500 Great Books for Teens. Scripps news prints 20 of those recommendations, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and, of course, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.Germany is prosecuting seven men for burning a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, in a case that highlights the symbolic power of books.And in Trenton, NJ, librarians are accusing a library accountant of refusing to purchase the novel Whore by Tanika Lynch for the library's collection because "he objected to the title."
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