“The second prophecy was even more intense than the first one, and introduced a lot of new rules I didn’t even know existed, but everyone else seemed to kind of already know about them. But you know what? We’re a misfit band of teens who will do anything for each other now, like stand up to that town bully who’s not even scary to us anymore, now that we’ve faced pure evil and lived.” An excerpt of Mallory Ortberg’s best-selling YA novel.
The Chosen Ones
Waiting for Lunch Break
“[YOU can only speak to what you experienced outside several seconds after your coworker entered the building, but several seconds before YOU yourself reached your cubicle. YOU do not know if it is in fact still raining out. YOU say nothing and are forever plagued by the unknowable nature of the immediate present.]” These short existentialist plays starring you and your coworkers are sure to stir up some feelings of gloom, doom, and familiarity.
“Everything goes and nothing matters.”
Recommended Reading: “When Literature Was Dangerous,” a history of censorship and the development of a culture “in which literature lacks urgency” and, perhaps, significance.
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Goodnight Road
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.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Diamant; Horowitz; DFW; Davis
New this week: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant; Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz; a limited edition of The David Foster Wallace Reader; and The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis (which I wrote about last week). For more on these and other recent titles, go read our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Where We Read
From German photographer Christoph Seelbach, 24 jaw-dropping photographs of incredible libraries.
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