“Audiobooks Read By You: Just like reading a book without actually reading a book, by reading a book and recording it in a studio.”
“I don’t remember any of these pages.”
The Long Birthday
On this day 124 years ago Raymond Chandler, hardest of the hard-boiled, was born. To celebrate the father of Philip Marlowe see these letters Chandler wrote to some of his contemporaries, listen to Chandler’s interview with Ian Fleming, and enjoy a couple classic Chandlerisms. Most importantly, read “The Simple Art of Murder,” the greatest essay about the mystery novel ever written.
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Bad Boys
Got a crush on Draco Malfoy? J.K. Rowling is concerned. In a piece on her website, she writes: “I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character.” Pair with: our own Elizabeth Minkel on Rowling and other authors with second thoughts.
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Curiosities: Pretend Lunch
In Open Letters, Sam Sacks writes “Quietude is godliness in Lark & Termite” and traces Faulkner’s influence on the new book.n+1 on the 10th anniversary of Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time”: “After her came the deluge: the end of the record industry as we know it, yes, but also the end of America as it used to conceive of itself.”Soft Skull’s Richard Nash on how to publish in a recession at Conversational Reading.William Safire on “the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.” Millions reader Scott says, “I wish the Book Review would do a LOT more of this kind of stuff.”The Internet is amazing I: J! Archive, “The fan-created archive of Jeopardy! games and players – 160,032 clues and counting!”The Internet is amazing II: The NY Times has a crossword puzzle blog.Maud Newton in Granta: “Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.””Sometimes, instead of eating alone, I pretend I’m having lunch with American literary legends. Today’s pretend guest was Cormac McCarthy.”Is MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville “the best Civil War novel ever?” (via)At Jacket Copy, Carolyn discovers Faulkner and Delillo in the Sports Illustrated archive.Sara Paretsky: “My editor tells me this is the last time the company will let her send me a marked manuscript.”Jenny Davidson on her special pencils.Dan Radosh exposes yet another tired journalistic cliche.The novel of manners, with zombies:: Pride and Prejudice and ZombiesIn praise of the long sentence. (Hear, hear!)
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An Eastern Bloc Monument
Cheers to Joshua Cohen for this early look at Péter Nádas’ mind-bending magnum opus, Parallel Stories. Our own review will appear sometime in 2014, when we finish reading. (But we can already say that all 1,100-page novels should begin, as this one does, with a dead body.)
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The Dan Brown Hype Machine
Amazon has given its entire front page over to a “letter” from CEO Jeff Bezos touting Dan Brown’s forthcoming gnostic thriller The Lost Symbol. It’s a mix of hyperbole and “thrilling” intrigue. My favorite excerpts: “This is one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time.” “The book remains so deeply under wraps that we’ve agreed to keep our stockpile under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry.” Bezos goes on to promise that Amazon will deliver Kindle owners the book “wirelessly while [they] sleep.”
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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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Making the Puzzle More Hip
Meet the 23-year-old who’s been tasked with “injecting some swag” into the “traditionally conservative New York Times [crossword] puzzle.”
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