You might think that recording an audiobook would be an easy task for Ice-T. Not so, or at least not always: the rapper and Law & Order star says an upcoming book in the Dungeons and Dragons universe tripped him up with its heavy use of fantasy slang. (h/t The Paris Review)
Forsooth
Hunter S. Thompson’s Job Application
From Hunter S. Thompson’s 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun: “And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you. I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.”
Curiosities
A “blogbook” on the financial crisis. The table of contents.Essential Bolaño: The Five Most Unskippable Passages in 266650 years worth of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” is now online for free all the way back to that very first strip. (via)
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The Sartorialist
Scott Schuman, also known as The Sartorialist, has published a book of his on-the-street fashion photographs. For a taste of what’s in the book, take a look at his blog, The Sartorialist.
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Plotting Genres
This week in book-related infographics: “A Plotting of Fiction Genres” from Electric Lit.
Your Lowest Depths of Misery?
“In 1865, Karl Marx confessed that he considered his chief characteristic ‘singleness of purpose,’ and that his favorite occupation was ‘bookworming.’ Five years later, Oscar Wilde wrote in an album called ‘Mental Photographs, an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions’ that his distinguishing feature was ‘inordinate self-esteem.'” Over at The New Yorker, take a look at how Marcel Proust’s questionnaires inspired a generation of question-by-by-question introspection.
Foundry Lit
Black Country, the debut book of poetry by Liz Berry, won this year’s Forward prize for best first collection. At The Guardian, Ben Wilkinson writes about the ways in which the book “digs deep into the poet’s West Midlands roots, enlivening and reimagining the heritage of that eponymous heartland of iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills, on both personal and public footings.”
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