How to Research
Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. "It's the landlords of the market," he writes, "who decide the mambo that you dance."
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Cultivating Profit
In an attempt to shift attention away from the ongoing E. coli scandal, Chipotle has announced the next round of authors whose work will be appearing on their cups as part of their ongoing Cultivating Thought series. Look for pieces by Amy Tan, Jeffery Eugenides, Neil Gaiman, and Barbara Kingsolver among five or six others - just be careful of the burritos.
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Pulp Saint
From The Atlantic comes the case for canonizing G.K. Chesterton, the "Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist."
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Crowd-source Everything
In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree "in aggregate about the quality of a book," non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be "more eclectic," "more supportive of debut authors," and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.
Two Degrees of Fame
The copy of Shakespeare's works disguised as a Hindu religious text and read by imprisoned Nelson Mandela will go on display for this first time later this summer.
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Who Should Readers Root For In The Super Bowl?
Need a team to root for during today’s Super Bowl? Might I suggest cheering on the team that represents a city angling to become America’s second UNESCO City of Literature? (Related: A few months back, Krakow, Poland, became the seventh city to join the UNESCO bunch.)
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