Fact: 4 percent of books are written by secret government agencies, while a full .5 percent are authored by helpful elves. How do we know? The New Yorker said so.
Helpful Elves
And Are We and Are We
Now that Horse_ebooks as we knew it is dead (or alive, depending on your viewpoint), the Internet is convening to pay tribute to the Dadaist masterpiece. At Slate, Will Oremus opines that the feed was “pretty great” even when it was a spambot, while at The Globe and Mail, Navneen Alang argues that it’s “more wonderful today, not less.”
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Dispatch from North Korea
Recommended Reading: A short story collection by an anonymous North Korean author was smuggled out of the country and will be published in English next year.
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“Everyone is simply wonderful”
You’ve heard about grade inflation, but universities are now dealing with academic job reference inflation, a slightly more adult kind of problem.
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A message for all my juggalettes and juggalos out there
The Rumpus has a little round up of links in anticipation of the 13th annual Gathering of the Juggalos. If you’re at all fascinated by the devoted fans of Insane Clown Posse, or if you yourself are one, you’d probably get a lot out of Kent Russell’s excellent essay “American Juggalo” in issue no. 12 of n+1.
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Writer as Painter
“The past fascinates me obsessively, I suppose, because it’s such a strange phenomenon. The past was the present at some point, and it was just as boring as the present. What makes it so important? What gives it that luminous, exalted quality where it becomes the past?” John Banville addresses these and many other heady questions in his new novel, The Blue Guitar.
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New from Beatrix Potter
A new story from Beatrix Potter will be published this September. A publisher discovered the almost-finished story, which features a cat in boots named Miss Catherine St Quintin, at the Victoria and Albert Museum archives. For a humorous take on modern children’s books, check out our own Jacob Lambert’s series Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?
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