Sick of Delta delays? Take one of Mallory Ortberg’s literary airlines listed in her humor post at The Toast. “Thanks for flying Jane Air. Are you escaping for business or for pleasure? Will you be stowing any wives today?”
A Bumpy Flight
Entering Lovecraft Country
“Lovecraft Country doesn’t just race along, it tears, demanding that you keep turning its pages without interruption. I read the second half of the book while walking in my neighborhood, holding the book with one hand and clutching bags of groceries in the other, and then finishing up in bed with a small LED lamp after my wife had fallen asleep. It’s one of those books.” Cory Doctorow reviews Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country at BoingBoing.
New Experimental Fiction
Angela Stubbs at The Nervous Breakdown examines current experimental fiction and the New Narrative movement through the work of Dodie Bellamy, Kirsten Kaschock, Julie P. Enzser and Aimee Bender.
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Drinking Fitzgerald Under the Table
“Most of us can’t write like our heroes, but nearly every one of us can try to drink like them.” Ian Crouch examines the myth of the great alcoholic writer and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend in The New Yorker‘s “The Book That Will Make You Never Want to Drink Again.”
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“Nearly Useless”
What do Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew and J. K. Rowling have in common? No one can read their signatures.
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A Bacon Bookmark
Bacon. Cheese slices. A saw blade. Buttered broccoli. Librarians around the world lament the strangest food (and non-food) items their patrons have used as bookmarks (via The Guardian). Pair with: an essay on librarians, sex, and stereotypes.
Stay Away from the Semicolon
“The Crested Asterisk camouflages itself in poor syntax, relying on this tactic to confuse its predators and prey. It is the only specimen known to cause injury by way of over-emphasis.” Introducing a field guide to rare punctuation.
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Robert Englund, Reader
Want to know what what Freddy Krueger’s reading? On his Twitter feed, actor (and author!) Robert Englund reports his favorite reads. Recently: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and The Singer’s Gun by The Millions contributor Emily St. John Mandel.
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‘NCIS’ To Cease Print Edition
“Longtime readers are already mourning the end of an era as CBS announced today that at the end of this month it would cease print operations of the popular drama NCIS.”
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