This week Uncanny Valley Press released Leave Luck to Heaven, Brian Oliu’s collection of lyric essays based on “the weird, painful things we made NES games carry for us because we didn’t know where else to put them.” To get a taste for Oliu’s style, check out “Mile Zero,” which will be featured in a different manuscript down the line.
Brian Oliu’s Video Game Essays
The Very Picture of Guilt
If the prospect of dealing with Frankenstorm is harshing your mellow this Halloween, you might want to look at The Paris Review Daily’s illustrated Telltale Heart.
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Nineteenth-Century Female Fiends
Erin Blakemore takes a look at a small publishing trend from the 1800s that followed female murderers and gave middle-class women a brief escape from Victorian values.
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Literary Map of Manhattan
An interactive literary map of Manhattan, at The New York Times Book Review: “Here’s where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.” (via The Rumpus)
The Books They Gave Me
It’s voyeuristic, confessional, cathartic, and sometimes downright funny. It’s The Books They Gave Me, a Tumblr where people share the books their exes gave as gifts.
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Coffee House + Emily Books
Coffee House Press recently announced it will be partnering with Emily Books, whose co-founder Emily Gould is a Year in Reading alum, to form their first imprint, which will publish two original titles a year. Their news pairs well with Electric Literature‘s “2015 Indie Press Preview.”
“Yes, strange, darkness best”
In 1962, Samuel Beckett wrote “Play.” Originally intended to be a stage production, the piece has now been adapted as a short film starring Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Juliet Stepherson. Come for the Beckett writing (full text can be found here), but stay for the disembodied heads-in-urns.
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Cheap Night Club, South Side of Chicago
Year in Reading alumnus Thomas Mallon’s foreword to the new edition of John O’Hara’s 1940 novel Pal Joey is available in The Paris Review Daily. Mallon predicts that “ O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival—outdated enough to be exotic—may at last be upon us.”
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