Recommended reading: on dictionary-related panics from The New Yorker. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s Millions essay “Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.”
Dictionary Panics
Goodbye to King of the Blurbs
Recently, it seemed hard to find a book not blurbed by Gary Shteyngart. He did blurb 150 books in the past decade. Yet now the author has decided to mostly retire from blurbing, he announced in The New Yorker. “Literature can and will go on without my mass blurbing. Perhaps it may even improve.” Pair with: Our own Bill Morris’s essay on whether or not to blurb.
This Curiosity is Awful
Looking for someone to whip your writing into shape? Then tweet the new Gordon Lish bot, a Twitter account which offers unvarnished critiques of your tweets and fictional sentences. (Related: Frank Kovarik on the editor’s relationship with Raymond Carver.)
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“Then did he see, at long last, that The Google did load.”
H. Jon Benjamin (of Bob’s Burgers notoriety) loaned his voice-over talents to Vulture and McSweeney’s for this 8-bit adaptation of Mike Lacher’s classic piece, “In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed As a Conquering Hero.”
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Nabokov on the Run
One hundred years ago this week, a teenage boy named Vladimir Nabokov fled revolutionary Russia with his family for the safety of Western Europe.
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Curiosities: The Case of Rudolph
Roberto Bolaño’s “Beach,” the story that has been the source of the notion that the late author was a heroin addict (since debunked in a fairly convincing fashion) has been translated into English.”Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It’s Cool To Read“”Top 10 US out of print books of 2008” and the heartening news that three of the books on the list will be brought back into print in 2009: Once a Runner, A Lion Called Christian, and Comanche Heart.Google now has 7 million books scanned.Put this instant classic in your stocking and save it for next year: “A hearing into the case of Rudolph, a reindeer“