The Good Lord Bird Goes Hollywood

Anjuli Raza Kolb reviews Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, which “tracks the history of whole animal and animal specimen preservation, particularly taxidermy, which refers to the stretching and mounting of the skins of vertebrates, from the seventeenth-century European explorers to the present, with a heavy focus on Victorian practitioners and collectors.” No word on whether or not Poliquin remarks on this curious Danish Facebook group of terrible taxidermy. (Bonus: Caitlin Horrocks’s new story on FiveChapters, “The Lion of Gripsholm – Part Four: IV. The Taxidermist.”)

Featuring missing titles from Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Roberto Bolaño, Vladimir Nabokov et al., The Missing Books is a project by Scott Esposito to assemble “a curated directory of books that do not exist, but should.” If that puts you in the mood for further Borgesian hijinks, consider Sam Allingham‘s piece about a summer spent cataloguing books in a university library basement.

The field has been set for The Morning News‘ annual Tournament of Books. Who will emerge victorious this year? Will it be a DeWitt or a deWitt?

This one won’t do much to lift the Sunday spirits, but it’s an important read nonetheless. Here’s Ed Miliband’s thoughtful essay at the London Review of Books on the growing inequality problem in Britain, which should look very familiar to those of us stateside. Here are a couple of less depressing Britain-related links to bring you back around.