The Arcades Project

My favorite part of my apartment is my wall-length bookshelf. When I look at it, I think of all the time I spent reading and accumulating its contents. I feel I’ve earned it, which is why I’m slightly insulted by Juniper Books’ $3,000-$100,000 “collection-development service,” a program designed for “people who want a library but haven’t had the time or inclination to amass a collection of books.”

The CS Monitor has a little piece about the travails of teenage novelists: “A youthful sensation doesn’t always translate into a distinguished literary career. For many teen authors, that first book proves a hard act to follow. Some never again meet with the kind of praise critics heaped upon their first offerings.”Speaking of (once) young phenoms, Bret Easton Ellis has a flashy new Web site that promotes his upcoming novel, Lunar Park. I’ve never read Ellis, but the Web site seems to indicate that this upcoming novel is about a character named Bret Easton Ellis, and it may or may not be autobiographical. Very meta. There’s an excerpt in there too.I’ve been enjoying EarthGoat lately. It’s a group blog out of Iowa City.

“Over four seasons, ‘Younger’ became a ‘Gossip Girl’ for the publishing industry—a glossy, winking take on a bounded universe of writers and editors and marketing campaigns.” If you need a show and love literary references, Younger might be the way to go.