“Sitting down to read The Actress, Amy Sohn’s newest novel, is even better than standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you disputes the price of a carton of orange juice, giving you extra time to read the tabloids. The Actress might be as licentious as a tabloid, but it is far more intelligently written. And, you probably won’t be reading it while standing in line inside a grocery store.”
Tabloid Fodder
Virtual Typesetting
"Many of the basic rules around typographic contrast and readability for print or 2D screens change in VR. When type becomes even a little bit more volumetric, the way people perceive it and interact with it changes. The type needs to be rooted in something real, otherwise it gets a little uncanny for the user.” What should typography look like in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interfaces? The Drum considers (via The Digital Reader). Wonder what a book fetishist might thing of all this...
A Fine Statement
This piece on the limited language of David Lynch from Dennis Lim over at The New Yorker is a fascinating journey into the mind of the peculiar auteur behind such gems as Eraserhead and Twin Peaks. Lynch will be publishing what he has called a “quasi-memoir” sometime in 2017.
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The Barbarian Nurseries to be a Film?
Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries is being developed into a movie, reports Edward Douglas for ComingSoon. (You can read an excerpt of the book over here.) Elsewhere, you can read Tobar’s take on how “the writer is a revered figure in France.”
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Seventeen Years Later
"It is a darker book, I don’t deny that, but that’s the story that came to me and wanted to be told.” Seventeen years after Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy ended, the writer is releasing La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his new trilogy, The Book of Dust. Pullman also said the second volume of the trilogy of already complete, according to The Guardian. Check out our own Janet Potter on grief, books, and His Dark Materials.
The Death of the Camera
"Camera-equipped smartphones are now in spitting distance of outnumbering traditional cameras in the percentage of photos and videos taken with them," according to analyst NPD Group.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Weigel; Galchen: Phillips; Lepore; Dixon; Hale
Out this week: Labor of Love by Moira Weigel; Little Labors by Rivka Galchen; Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips; Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore; Letters to Kevin by Stephen Dixon; and The Fat Artist and Other Stories by Benjamin Hale. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Top 20 Short Stories of 2010
Chris Flynn of Australian Book Review runs down the top 20 short stories of 2010 (many of them American) at his blog, Fly the Falcon.
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