Those of you who know the joy of reading romance novels with your friends have probably wondered at some point what people who write erotica are like. Are they bankers and professionals? Housewives and mistresses? Are they some combination of all of the above? At Slate, a chaste look at the lives of unchaste writers.
Not Very Titillating
I Ain’t Sayin’ Eustace Tilley is a Gold-Digger…
Apropos of our popular “Open Letter to Kanye West,” may we recommend the “Shouts & Murmurs in this week’s New Yorker? “I have more than a million [Facebook] fans,” writes a certain unnamed narrator. “Do you know how many fans Books have? Twenty-five thousand seven hundred and sixty-four.”
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Project Yosemite
Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty’s Project Yosemite is “an ongoing adventure to timelapse Yosemite in a extreme way.” Their first video is (ahem) extremely beautiful.
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Inseparable
Male bonding can take many forms, among them the rarely-seen joint book tour, which Mike Harvkey and Josh Weil decided to undertake in support of their new novels. The two write about meeting each other, travelling around America and bouncing ideas off trusted friends in a Salon essay. FYI, our own Bill Morris wrote a piece about his own book tour for The Daily Beast.
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Amazon’s Top 100
Amazon has finished unveiling its top-100 books for 2010. At the top of the big list: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Curiosities: Return to the Monkey House
The Walking Tour is drawing ever nearer! Get all the details and RSVP if you want to be notified of any schedule changes.In the NYRB, Mark Danner examines the politics of torture, and J.M. Coetzee gets deep inside Samuel Beckett’s head.James Wood finger-drumming on YouTube is just the most weirdly hypnotic thing we’ve ever seen.Typewriter-part art. (via The Rumpus)A new front runner in the coolest bookshelf contest. Think of it – geographic classification! (for American lit only)”Geoff Dyer book unlikely to win Bad Sex Award“Jane Austen got rejection letters too.Wow. A new Kurt Vonnegut collection is on the way. Amazon has it listed.A glimmer of good news in the newspaper business?Audrey Niffenegger is having a pretty good recession.Further Reading: Kevin’s list of families and fiction has garnered many additions from readers in the comments.
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Jesse Ball in Guernica Magazine
Guernica is running Pieter Emily, Jesse Ball’s newest work, in three installments over the next six weeks. The first installment is now available.