Recommended reading (and listening): “Almost Like the Blues” by Leonard Cohen.
“Almost Like the Blues”
Goodbye, Byes
Recommended Reading: Jason Arthur’s farewell to goodbye-to-New-York essays.
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The International Scramble for a Nobel Laureate’s Work
Booksellers—both large and small—are struggling to stock books by Abdulrazak Gurnah, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
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Quote for the Ages
While doing some work for his publisher, Jesse Browner discovered something odd about a book he published twelve years ago. One sentence — one he thought of at the time as mostly unremarkable — went viral after the book came out, eventually reaching over two thousand hits on Google. What was it like to find this out? At The Paris Review Daily, he writes about the experience. You could also read our interview with our own Mark O’Connell on viral celebrity and his e-book Epic Fail.
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On Target
We might not get to choose between Peeta and Gale, but we can have Katniss Everdeen’s archery skills. Since The Hunger Games became popular, young girls are picking up bows and arrows more than ever before. Membership at USA Archery has doubled in the past two years, and people are buying recurve bows faster than they can make them. Perhaps they’d also enjoy the Hunger Games day camp we wrote about earlier.
Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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New DFW
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished novel, The Pale King, appears this week in The New Yorker. It’s good.
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More of the Little Prince
Unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince have been unearthed, and they contain clues to a political reading of the children’s classic.
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