Brandon Stanton, the man behind the candid portrait blog Humans of New York, takes on BookExpo America in The Humans of BEA, A Photo-Essay.
Portraits of BEA
Art, Lit, and Finnegans Wake
"I'm a writer through and through, but the art world—to a large extent—provides the arena in which literature can be vigorously addressed, transformed, and expanded." Frederic Tuten interviews Tom McCarthy about the overlap between the visual arts and literature, the importance of reading, and living, voraciously, and the power of Finnegans Wake for BOMB Magazine. Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone's review of BOMB: The Author Interviews.
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And All That Jazz
Have you ever wondered what The Great Gatsby would sound like? Designer Vladimir V. Kuchinov made The Generative Gatsby, a book that features typography based on famous 1920s jazz songs. "The following work is a visual experiment, a study of how music of this era, its rhythms, syncopations and patterns could alter prose to a new typographic frontiers keeping content legible as it could be," he writes on his website.
Too Little, Too Late
In an article for Slate, Farhad Manjoo asks whether or not Google+ squandered its chance to compete with Facebook.
A Song of Spare Time
As you might expect, the world of Game of Thrones fanfiction is complicated, pornographic and more than a little bit intimidating.
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The High Price
Recommended Reading: On Patricia Highsmith, Carol, and being the queer daughter of a queer mother: "I am doomed to die an ugly death or at least to be separated from my partner, probably violently. So is my queer mother and my partner and my cousin and many of my friends. We are all doomed, it seems, because this is the only story American media tells about queer women."
The Bad Sex Award
What's it like to win the Literary Review's Bad Sex award? As 2010 "winner" Rowan Somerville reports, "It's a hard pill to swallow ... Despite the magazine's assertion that 'it's only a bit of fun' there's an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools about the whole thing."
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“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov's Speak, Memory and considers "the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order." Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg's piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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