What would Blood Meridian look like as a children’s book? The question is vaguely unsettling, but Jerry Puryear set out to answer it anyway, drawing up detailed mockups of literary children’s books and posting them on his Tumblr. At Slate, a selection of his book covers. (This might be a good time to look back on our US-UK Book Cover Battle.)
Goodnight Road
The Year of Incendiary Writing
Caitlin Flanagan’s long Atlantic piece on Joan Didion has sparked a lot of conversation. Among the article’s contentious lines: “to really love Joan Didion … you have to be female.”
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Performing the Trick
Chloe N. Clark writes about magical reveals in fiction. As she explains it, “authors, like magicians, need to know when the best moment to pull back the curtain is.” Pair with this Millions essay on using light and a full palette of color to paint fiction.
A Frothy, Heady BFFship
“It seems that not only do Americans see beer as a person, they see beer as a person other people like better than them.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace, Kingsolver, Schutt, Millet, Kramer, Wagman, Gillespie, Pullman, Sacks, Jackson
There are plenty of new books to this week to fill that post-election void: Both Flesh and Not: Essays, a posthumously published collection from David Foster Wallace; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior; Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt; Magnificence by Lydia Millet; and These Things Happen, a debut by longtime TV writer Richard Kramer. From the indies, we have The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman and Keyhole Factory by William Gillespie. Also out are Philip Pullman’s new version of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm; Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks; and a big new Michael Jackson biography by a former Rolling Stone editor.
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Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”
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The Millions on Facebook
Hey! Are you a fan of our Facebook page? If not, you’re missing out on some unique, international Millions content – like this shelf section Nick Moran spotted in a Kaohsiung bookstore, or this brand of “literary” whiskey discovered by Thom Beckwith in Ireland.
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