50 States of Literature

Among the books hitting shelves this week are Pulitzer winner and New Yorker staffer Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University and memoirist and poet Nick Flynn's The Ticking is the Bomb. Also new, Melville House is putting out a novella, Union Jack, by Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, and NYRB Classics has published Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy a novel by Olivia Manning based on her time in Eastern Europe during World War II. Rachel Cusk provides an introduction to the edition.

For the last couple days #badwritingtips, a collection of hilarious writing tips to take your novel from typical to terrible, have been trending on twitter. The Guardian rounded up a few of their favorites. Perhaps this advice will help out the unlucky souls retweeted on working on my novel.

"What do these two books have in common?...Open each cover and you will only find similarities: They are the same book." For The Globe and Mail, our own Claire Cameron writes about one book being marketed with two different covers and titles to appeal to different audiences. Pair with: an essay about book covers featuring headless, backless women, and another on the beauty of typewritten book covers.

"What a horrible silent noisy people they are ... My feeling toward those mice is flat-out fear. It has to do with the unexpected, unbidden, unavoidable, virtually silent, persistent, ulteriorly motivated appearance of these animals.” It looks like Franz Kafka really didn't like mice. Reiner Stach, author of the definitive two-part biography of Kafka (The Decisive Years and The Years of Insight) has released a new book of Kafka ephemera called Is That Kafka? 99 Finds full of fascinating facts that never found a place in the biographies at large. This Millions review of Stach's biographies might also suit your Kafka fancy.

Virginia Heffernan weighs in on the whole Wikipedia v. Philip Roth thing, brilliantly pitting "Anglo-American Great Man media empires"  against "Polyglot Open-Source new media".