Unhappy with Go Set A Watchman? You may be able to get your money back. Traverse City’s Brilliant Books is offering a refund to customers, as well as an apology for what they feel was a misleading marketing campaign.
Go Get A Refund
“Call Me” – Ishmael
Another phone-related book project: Call Me Ishmael, a site that collects stories about reading and life via voicemail messages. The instructions are simple: call Ishmael at 774-325-0503 and leave him a message “about a book you love and a story you have lived.” Several of these messages are transcribed and posted online every week but, if we’re being honest, we appreciate this project for the pun as much as for the stories.
Gary Shteyngart Becomes A Glasshole
Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is now a reality. He got to try Google Glass and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker. “When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.”
Poets and Tomatoes
“We are hermits, that is true. We live in tiny rooms, and we stay in those rooms hours upon hours every day, every month, every year. But we also like to walk around and throw ourselves into big crates of tomatoes, and roll around in them, and then get up all tomato-stained.” Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera talks about living life as a poet (which apparently includes a lot of tomatoes) in an interview with the Guardian.
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Much Ado About Burgers
Exhibit A: Joseph R Worthen’s ongoing series investigating the state of “Fast Food Hamburgers in the Southeastern United States.” (Parts Two and Three, too.) Exhibit B: Blake Butler’s nauseating (yet hypnotic) “Review of the New Wendy’s Pretzel Burger.”
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Keys Under the Basket
“Mr. Fogg assured us he would touch down at our place at precisely 8:45 in the evening. Imagine our delight when he not only arrived with all the punctuality befitting an Englishman, but also quite literally touched down! In a hot air balloon!” Introducing literary couchsurfing.
Epic Fail In the Wall Street Journal
“Mr. [Mark] O’Connell is an intelligent and very funny writer,” says Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “But Epic Fail will also prompt you to consider how shallow—and ugly—humans can be.” (Bonus: a reference to getting pitted, just so pitted.)
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Dial M for Middling
You’d think the home country of Agatha Christie, Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes would remain the home of great mysteries, but apparently the UK is in trouble. At least, that’s the argument of Christopher Fowler, a writer who smells a rat.