Possibly inspired by YiR alum Elizabeth McCracken, who tweeted out tips for applying to MFA programs last week, Zak Smith (the man who painted every single page of Gravity’s Rainbow) tweeted a series of tips for aspiring art critics. Among other advice, he dictates to his tweeps: “If Andy Warhol could have made it, do not write about it.”
How to Write about Art
News Roundup
Like bestseller lists? The Book Standard’s giving them away for free for the next two weeks.Alibris is bought by a private equity firm. PW article suggests Abebooks could be next. (via BookFinder blog)Small publishers book big rewards (via Mumpsimus), but…Bookshops fall prey to online sales.
Tuesday New Release Day: Aira, Wallace, Costello
New Directions releases César Aira’s The Hare this week. The novel was featured on our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview not long ago. Today also marks the release date for David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello’s Signifying Rappers, which is being re-released by Little, Brown.
Torching Alexandria
“This particular moonshot fell about a hundred-million books short of the moon.” Over at The Atlantic James Somers has the story of what went wrong with Google’s audacious plan to digitize all the world’s books. And like an interesting time capsule, you might want to read Robin Sloan in our own pages from some years back about a very, very cool book scanner.
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On Negative Book Reviews
“An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good.” In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the “enfeebling of literary criticism.” From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.