Rizzoli’s is closing, but if the owners have their way, there’ll be a Rizzoli’s II opening its doors in the near future. In the meantime, you can read this Times piece about the bookstore, which puts its closing into context.
More on Rizzoli’s
An Interview with Jaimy Gordon
“I’ve spent my whole professional life swirling the eddies of the margins… What I want right now is to see my book in an airport. Then in a couple of years everyone will figure out that I’m too esoteric, and I’ll be back…” The New York Times posts a curious interview with the unconventional Jaimy Gordon, winner of this year’s National Book Award.
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For Sale: Literary Homes
A spate of notable literary homes have dotted high-end real estate recently. Earlier, The Telegraph reported that Bran Castle, whose famed fictional occupants include Count Dracula from the eponymous novel by Bram Stoker, is seeking offers. Yesterday, Ray Bradbury’s cheery 3-bedroom yellow house was listed at at $1.5 million. Sadly, the more-affordable $350,000 home of beloved children’s book writer Beverly Clearly was snapped up last week. Writers hoping to add to the stock of literature-imprinted real estate, take note: Detroit nonprofit Write A House, which renovates vacant homes and awards them to writers and poets free of charge, is accepting applications until June 21.
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Grid World
“He is for the most part interested in documenting the sources of our unusual suffering, those initial shocks that brought about the trauma in the first place. Nothing ‘languishes listlessly’ in his music; all those slowly orbiting fragments are drawn back together in furious rotation, sucked inexorably in, towards a volatile core. The mood never stabilizes; madness reigns supreme.” This piece by Tom Regel at The Rumpus on realism in the work of DJ/Producer Flying Lotus is both thorough and convincing.
The FTC and Foggy Disclosure Rules
Ed Champion interviews the FTC’s Richard Cleland in an effort to bring some clarity to the new FTC disclosure rules targeting “bloggers.” If this interview is any indication, the rules are imprecise and based on a false distinction, at best. For what it’s worth, I’ll happily disclose that we do get sent books for review from publishers, and the ways The Millions makes money are outlined on our (new and improved) Support page.
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Four Legs Good
This week in book-related infographics: a look at “Memorable Animals from Literature” ranging from Moby Dick to Snowball to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. After all, lest we forget, “four legs good, two legs bad.”
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