Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this — who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prose pick greats that are no longer great.
A Bit Rusty
Virtual Typesetting
"Many of the basic rules around typographic contrast and readability for print or 2D screens change in VR. When type becomes even a little bit more volumetric, the way people perceive it and interact with it changes. The type needs to be rooted in something real, otherwise it gets a little uncanny for the user.” What should typography look like in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interfaces? The Drum considers (via The Digital Reader). Wonder what a book fetishist might thing of all this...
●
●
His Dark Resignation
Phillip Pullman, author of the much-beloved His Dark Materials series, has resigned as a patron of the Oxford Literary Festival due to the festival's practice of not paying its guest authors. This move comes only one week after Pullman and the Society of Authors released an open letter to The Publisher's Association and the Independent Publisher's Guild, demanding authors receive fair compensation for their work.
●
●
When Foxes Become Dogs
The Silver Fox Experiment began in 1959 when Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev began selectively breeding wild foxes until they became more "dog-like" and tame. Today, the experiment continues at The Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk.
●
●
Lego My Struggle
"Each one of those books is, like, several hundred pages long. So, that’s a lot of romantic anxiety and adolescent/young-adult/middle-aged angst to distill into pictures, but as far as I can tell, it’s all there: salted fish, shower-sex, alcohol-induced existential despair, the whole shebang! No reading required." The Melville House blog, MobyLives, revisits the work of an anonymous artist who reenacted all of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series using LEGOs. See also: our review of Knausgaard's epic.
●
●
What is a diverse book?
Year in Reading alum Rumaan Alam reflects at The Literary Hub about the labels we ascribe to texts. Pair with his recent interview with Lindsay Hatton.
Tuesday New Release Day: Smith, Hitchens, Straub, Eco, Rothbart, Seidel, Morris, Seals, Eugenides
A big week for books: Zadie Smith's NW is out (read the first lines), as is Christopher Hitchens's Mortality, a collection of essays penned while he fought cancer (our essay on Hitchens' death) (his collection Arguably is out in paperback today). More new books: Emma Straub's Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, Umberto Eco's essay collection Inventing the Enemy, Davy Rothbart's essay collection My Heart Is an Idiot, Frederick Seidel's poetry collection Nice Weather, documentarian Errol Morris's A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Navy Seal book about the bin Laden mission. Also, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is now out in paperback (read Eugenides on the book's genesis), as is Stephen Greenblatt's Pulitzer winner The Swerve.
●
●