A Russian publisher has stooped to a new low: it added “fake quotes from fake newspapers on the cover of a … novel released this summer.” That’s not all, either. Apparently the publishers are trying to bill the book as a “Swedish” crime novel even though it was actually written by a Russian under a pseudonym.
Who Can You Trust Anymore?
Next time I’d like a literary juice box too.
Yesterday Maria Popova, aka the mastermind behind Brain Pickings, launched her latest project: Literary Jukebox. I’m definitely gonna recommend this to Nick Moran for his next Great Tumblr Taxonomy.
●
●
2 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
On “Cool”
Somewhere along the way, the word “cool” became “the most popular slang term of approval in English.” Humanities has a pretty cool (hip, rad, dope, groovy, punk, hot, sweet) theory, tracing it as far back as Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Mules and Men, and the time when “cool was black… cool was jazz.” (Related reading: the most excellent Hepster’s Dictionary (pdf) of 1939 jive talk, and our own history of the slang word “like.”)
●
●
I Am What I Am
Pharrell Williams is suing Black Eyed Peas member Will.I.Am over the latter’s insistence that he owns copyright on the phrase, “I Am.” If the judge in this case is truly worth their salt, they should force both musicians to settle this matter with a no-holds-barred John Clare-esque “I Am” poem off.
●
●
Epic Fail Aces Its Lulz Studies
“While others … have explored the more serious contexts of online humor, particularly when it tilts into the grim and mean, in Epic Fail [Mark] O’Connell makes a useful addition to what I’ll refer to as Lulz Studies by attempting to put this variety of Schadenfreude in cultural-historical perspective.”
During the period in which Portugal was under Salazar’s dictatorship, which of course included censorship of books and press, portuguese author Dinis Machado wrote three noir crime novels under the pseudonym Dennis McShade (notice how he played with his own name), pretending to be an american author. The books claimed to have been translated by Dinis Machado himself, who was called by the censor agents regarding this american. He was able to convince them that the books were harmless, and they were published. The set is in America, but you can identify some metaphors regarding the dictatorship in Portugal.
This kind of pretending games can be fun. Though this story is not related to the one you are talking about, I thought it would show you how this pretending games can be subversive. And by the way, the three novels by Dennis McShade are incredibly good. He was, of course, a reader of Chandler and Hammett.
Well, I have to wonder if the fake quotes from the fake reader are any more authentic than the hyperbolic blurbs from ostensibly “real” readers….