Who is Samantha Shannon, and why should you care about her? Well, for starters, she’s twenty-one years old, her debut novel The Bone Season is coming out next week, and her publisher suspects she may be the next J.K. Rowling.
Bright Young Thing
Borders may liquidate
Borders may be on the brink of liquidation. If the deal goes through, you may be able to score some excellent deals.
Barbie Bodies
Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex, writes at Mother Jones about “hotness,” commodification, and women’s bodies.
Fifty Years of Naked Lunch
A Friday afternoon pharmacy lesson at Stop Smiling: an interview with William Boroughs, celebrating 50 years of Naked Lunch.
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Living like Fitzgerald
“Recent research has shown that messy, dark, noisy, booze-filled environments like the one Fitzgerald cultivated at La Paix can, in fact, help stimulate creativity.” The Atlantic reports on the importance of environment for creativite work and / or gives you an excuse to live like Fitzgerald.
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Beauty Isn’t Logic Isn’t Beauty
Symmetry’s addictive. Beethoven sought it in the order of chords, Einstein in the logic of theory. Countless writers, too, have sought its imprint in the perfect mot juste. In Aeon Magazine, Philip Ball pleads fervently against the pursuit of beauty in logic, and logic in beauty. “There’s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres… the search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation.”
It’s Okay, I Guess
If your default mood hovers between melancholy and despair, you may be cheered (or at least made a bit less glum) by this argument that striving for happiness is bad for us in the long run. Mari Ruti makes the case that a “happy, balanced life” depends in large part on a kind of emotional numbness.
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Who is Sham Blanderson?
“Sham Blanderson,” presumably the book critic for Moo Pork Magazine, is posting the best sentence he reads each day on Twitter.