Somehow we knew that Gary Shteyngart had a pretty interesting childhood. As Andy Borowitz explains in a review of Little Failure, the author’s new memoir, the elder Shteyngart regaled his son with “outlandish” stories, most notably “a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork.” You can learn what the author likes to read today in his Year in Reading piece.
Foul Swine
New Classics
The Slate staff compiled a list of “new classics” — “the most enduring” books, shows, movies, and ideas since 2000.
Now That’s What I Call an Elastic Product!
Meet the latest woman to join the “Billionaire’s Club.” Her name is Sara Blakely, and she invented Spanx.
●
●
Essential Reading
Over at Vulture, twenty-eight authors including Alexander Chee, Margo Jefferson, Colum McCann, and Eileen Myles write about the books that changed their lives. Pair with our article in which six authors reflect on their childhood reading.
Crunching the Reading Numbers
Some cool number-crunching from Millions staff writer Patrick at the Goodreads blog. As we’ve long suspected, reading isn’t all about “new,” and the data shows a long tail of older books that are still high on people’s reading lists.
The FTC and Foggy Disclosure Rules
Ed Champion interviews the FTC’s Richard Cleland in an effort to bring some clarity to the new FTC disclosure rules targeting “bloggers.” If this interview is any indication, the rules are imprecise and based on a false distinction, at best. For what it’s worth, I’ll happily disclose that we do get sent books for review from publishers, and the ways The Millions makes money are outlined on our (new and improved) Support page.
●
●
Eating And/Or Reading
“The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed.” In the New Yorker, Bee Wilson considers the “Pleasures of the Literary Meal,” something Seth Sawyers wrote about for the Millions last year.
●
●
Carl Köhler in Toronto
The University of Toronto now has a webpage up for its current exhibition “Beyond the Words: Author Portraits by Carl Köhler.” See some of Köhler’s remarkable portraits of artists and intellectuals and read about him here.