Why would anyone write a book anonymously? Maria Bustillos ponders anonymity at The New Yorker. “Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a wall explicitly thrown up, not only between writer and reader, but between the writer’s work and his life.”
What’s in a Name?
Murakami’s Latest is Flying Off the Shelves
Haruki Murakami’s latest book – the title of which translates to Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage – went on sale in Japan last month, and in that time it’s been selling over a million copies a week. You can catch a glimpse of the book’s first and earliest reviews over at the NY Daily News. (By the way, did you know Murakami translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese?)
We Read No More
Victor Hugo, when asked about the other parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy that aren’t the widely-read Inferno, had this to say: “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.” Ouch. Is this why so many of us haven’t even read Dante, despite his being a kind of cultural icon?
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A Frank Poet
“Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. / Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.” Last week, Ocean Vuong published his newest collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. This week, it seems to be all anyone can talk about (because it’s fantastic). Here’s a piece from The New Yorker on Vuong and his designs for the English language.
Reading Rooster
There are plenty of reading apps out there, but a company called Rooster has released another, this one designed to “allow users to consume bite-sized pieces of highly curated fiction” whenever they have a few spare moments. In an interview with BookBusiness, Yael Goldstein Love, the editorial director of the project, described Rooster as aiming “to bring immersive reading, particularly fiction reading, back into busy peoples’ lives.” It’s difficult to know how to feel about this. Of course we think busy people should read good fiction, but is this just a precursor to the inevitable change of literature in the face of growing technology and shortened attention spans?
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The Water: Stay Out of It
Shark Week 2013 isn’t for another ten months, but you can satisfy your hunger for tales of nautical catastrophe and man-eating fish with these two databases: WreckSite, a collection of shipwrecks classified by worldwide positions, and The International Shark Attack File, a compilation of “all known shark attacks.”
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“The contract gave me the last word on spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage and so on.”
If you’ve ever battled an editor over punctuation, or found yourself calculating just how long it’d take to burn your copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll be delighted by this oldie-but-goodie blog post by Millions favorite Helen DeWitt.
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