Apocalyptic literature is nothing new, but it may, according to Grayson Clary, be entering a new era. In Bookforum, he argues that Benjamin Percy’s The Dead Lands ushers the genre into its mannerist phase. Sample quote: “The Dead Lands is really the stripped, buffed skeleton of a road story, set up to show off—attractively—an enormous quantity of decorating tropes.” You could also read our interview with Percy.
Not Dead Yet
The Ultimate Bestseller
This week in book-related infographics: Waterstones has put together an illustrated formula for the ultimate bestseller, “a thriller tale of crime, bondage and wizardry.”
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Yossarian Wins
At The Paris Review Daily, Katherine Hill (whose debut novel came out two weeks ago) comes up with a bracket of ideal literary friends. (Understandably, Portnoy beat out Humbert Humbert.)
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A Literary Showman
Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes for The Literary Hub about Don DeLillo’s deep Italian-American roots. Pair with Ripatrazone’s Millions review of DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K.
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Google Books’s Impasse
“When it started almost 15 years ago, [Google Books] … seemed impossibly ambitious,” writes Scott Rosenberg. “An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world.” But these days, Google’s moonshot has turned into a “mundane reality.” How?
Gay Talese Has His Own Lapel Shape
Put This On is a “web series about dressing like a grown up.” In their seventh episode, they drop by the Corduroy Appreciation Club’s annual meeting, and they also check out Gay Talese‘s closet.
“Distressingly human”
“Today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable leather jackets, their claws for manicures.” Becca Rothfeld writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the “the distressingly human lives of vampires today.” Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson‘s “Ethical Vampires” and “Ethical Vampires, part II.”