This year’s Tournament of Books comes to an end today, after nearly a month of analyses, debates and thoughtful arguments. In the final round, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life squares off with James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, both of which are, in Héctor Tobar’s words, “unorthodox, historical novels.” Now that the verdicts are in, the only question is: who won? (You could also read the quarterfinal judged by our own Lydia Kiesling.)
Final Round of the Tournament of Books
A Conservative Estimate
While makers of the graph admit that it’s no substitute for a real poll, according to a heatmap of political books purchased on Amazon in the United States, conservative books are more popular than their left-wing rivals. Another heatmap of note: a firm tracked the use of the F-bomb on twitter over the course of a day to see where America’s foulest mouths are concentrated.
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Your Words Here
For years, one of the best ways to make a living as a writer (if you didn’t want to go into academia) was to become an ad copywriter. They heyday of print was flush with opportunities to make bank off billboards and publications. At The Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring looks back on the ad copy of Fay Weldon, who gave the UK, among other things, the slogan “Vodka makes you drunker quicker.” (Related: Hope Mills on working for a creative agency.)
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Nice Wrinkles, Beckett
Portraits of authors composed of their own words? Why not.
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The Mirror Stage
These Lacanian jokes will have you looking in the mirror and contemplating your existence.
Requiescat in pace, TriQuarterly
TriQuarterly, the long-running trail-blazing literary journal more or less dreamed into existence by the late Charles Newman, is apparently no more, due to budget cuts at Northwestern University. Newman’s foreword to his first issue as editor, reprinted at A Public Space, should be required reading for anyone thinking about the purpose and future of the little magazine and its role in the artistic ecology.
Wounded
“Maybe I’m not outraged. I’m exhausted and open and exposed and a lot of other people are too because we are wounds that get picked at and picked at and picked at one day, there won’t be anything left to heal.” At The Rumpus, Roxane Gay writes on the sexism and racism of Seth MacFarlane’s Oscars jokes.
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