Move over, Hemingway! Youtube sensation PewDiePie, as famous for his video game commentary as he is for his loyal fanbase (the curiously-dubbed “Bro Army”), is a New York Times best-seller. PewDiePie’s This Book Loves You is one of three books written by Youtubers currently enjoying positions on various best-seller lists.
Defining a Generation
Go Cardinals?
How’s your NCAA bracket doing? Busted? Well, maybe you should’ve picked your teams based on which ones turn the highest profit. The Atlantic analyzed the financial data and, voilà, their bracket correctly predicted nine of the teams in the Sweet Sixteen.
A Conch Republic Treasure Trove
A U.S. Navy commodore’s 1823 General Order announcing the imminent seizure of Key West – at the time known as Allenton – has been obtained, along with “1,000 other pieces of the island’s history,” by the Monroe County Public Library. The collection also includes a book from 1858 written by William Curry, “a penniless Bahamian immigrant who became Florida’s first millionaire.” Best of all? You can view some of the cache online.
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Touring The Third Hotel
“I thought quite a lot about the vocabulary of tourism, the kinds of desires that vocabulary seems designed to ignite, and the promises made, and how those promises change or vanish altogether depending on who you are.” The Paris Review interviews Laura van den Berg about writing, tourism, and her new novel, The Third Hotel. From our archives: our 2015 interview with van den Berg.
Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front
For a female war photographer and novelist who’s dealt with pink covers on her books, male colleagues who dismiss the Orange Prize and a publisher who titles her book Shutterbabe, it’s pretty rich to hear that our world is apparently “post-feminist.”
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Class with Harry Crews
When asked about his tenure as a professor of creative writing, Harry Crews used to say, “I may be at the university, but I damn sure ain’t of the university.” But in talking to his former students, Crews’s biographer, Ted Geltner, found that in spite of the writer’s efforts to distance himself from academia, he really was a passionate, memorable teacher. (Bonus: Yours truly named one Crews work his “most representative” Florida book.)
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Nicholson Baker Overload
In addition to House of Holes‘ recent coverage in the New York Review of Books and Open Letters Monthly (and on The Millions), the latest edition of The Paris Review features an interview with “mad scientist of smut” Nicholson Baker. (You can check out an excerpt here.) But for those still unsatisfied, Adam Wilson has assembled a canon of raunchy literature.