Out this week: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant; Cementville by Paulette Livers; Damage Control by Amber Dermont; Blood Will Out by Up in the Air author Walter Kirn; Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler; and The Haunted Life, a new collection of early writing by Jack Kerouac.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hustvedt; Poissant; Livers; Dermont; Kirn; Butler; Kerouac
Building the Library of Utopia
Google ran into a wall of litigation when it tried to create a public digital archive of every book in the world. Now a team of academics is taking on the challenge. Nicholas Carr examines whether Robert Darton and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society can succeed where Silicon Valley failed. Also be sure to check out our review of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Tuesday New Release Day: Johnson, Auslander
New books this week: Adam Johnson's much talked-about novel The Orphan Master's Son, Shalom Auslander's first novel and Hope: A Tragedy.
Lights Out
Want to turn on your creativity? Turn off the lights. A new study shows that dim lighting “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” which sounds like a great cure for writer's block if there ever was one.
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On Reading Salman Rushdie in India
Literary critic Amitava Kumar has written a personal essay for the Chronicle on his experience reading from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, where the work has banned for 23 years. Read The Millions coverage of the festival here.
Thursday Links
LA Weekly writes up the Los Angeles indie bookstore scene, of which I was once a part. Book Soup, my former place of employment, gets a nice and quite accurate writeup. I've never shared my stories on the blog, but, for example, the stuff about Faye Dunaway and Elton John is true. Tyson, the star of the article, was one of our more colorful newsstand employees when I was working there. The article's take on Book Soup owner Glenn, meanwhile, is hilarious and right on the nose. As a bonus, the LA Weekly's package includes a little bookstore tour of Los Angeles that serves as a nice counterpoint to the one that Garth created for NYC recently.Speaking of LA, obsessive film fans and those who love them should note that Amazon is having a big sale on Criterion Collection DVDs right now.Looking for a new place to live? The house in which Jack Kerouac was born is now for rent.TEV goes out on a "limn" with Michiko Kakutani.
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The End of Woman-Baiting
“What do women have to do with the internet? We submit that, at least in the eyes of media executives, women are the internet. Women, we mean the internet, are commanding a larger share of the traditional print market. The internet, we mean women, is less responsive to conventional advertising than to commenting, sharing, and other forms of social interaction. Women, we mean the internet, are putting men, we mean magazine editors, out of work. The internet, we mean women, never pays for its content — or for their drinks!" The editors at n + 1 take on the woman-baiting article.
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Still Fresh
There’s a new trailer out for the book Worn Stories, a collection of pieces about clothing and memory edited by Emily Spivack. The contributor list includes, among others, Heidi Julavits, John Hodgman, Greta Gerwig and Marina Abramović. (h/t The Rumpus)
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Thank Your Mother
Recommended (and timely!) reading: Christy Wampole on why "You Will Never Be Able to Thank Your Mother Enough."
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