A couple weeks ago, I recommended that budding Randians read this self-edifying excerpt, taken from Ayn Rand’s version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now, Rand has penned her own version of You’ve Got Mail, again kindly published by Mallory Ortberg.
“How enterprising of you”
Tuesday New Release Day: Max, Evison, Levithan
New this week is D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, which we excerpted last week. Also out are The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison and Every Day by David Levithan.
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Snail Twitter
If you’re tired of only getting catalogs and bills in your mailbox, ask your friends to mail their tweets. For a month, Giles Turnbull corresponded with 15 of his Twitter followers by mail. “Tweeting by post made me appreciate the online and the offline. Brevity is a good thing, but there’s no reason we should only be brief on Twitter,” Turnbull writes for The Morning News. Pair with: Our roundup of literary Twitter’s first tweets.
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The Kenyon Review 2013 Short Fiction Contest
What can you do for free these days? Well, for one thing, you can apply to The Kenyon Review’s 2013 Short Fiction Contest. The deadline is February 28th.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sebald; Ugresic; Storace; Nunn; Mailer
Out this week: A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald; Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresic; The Book of Heaven by Patricia Storace; Chance by Kem Nunn; and new paperback editions of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
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How Advanced is the Reading Level of Your Website?
Google has launched a new search filter to its “advanced search page” that allows people to sort content based on reading level — basic, intermediate, or advanced. Google thinks The Millions lands in the middle. Search your website using the feature to see how Google rates it. (Disclaimer: we can’t see any rhyme or reason to their ratings.) (Update for you visitors from Gawker: If this Google business bores you – and lets be honest, it’s not that exciting – stick around and check out our much more scintillating Year in Reading series, featuring Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Sam Lipsyte and all manner of literary luminaries.)
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Paris to the power of 4
Rosecrans Baldwin’s Paris I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down is set in Paris, France. But there are also 25 Parises in the USA. For “Our French Connection,” a series of features for The Morning News, Baldwin hit up four towns called Paris in America and asked locals to opine on the French way of life. You can buy the whole four part series as an epub for $3.
The End of Wall Street
In New York, Gabriel Sherman checks in on Wall Street and finds that the big money culture may be gone for good. “There has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation.”