“It turned out that the most successful Christmas records tended to have two common qualities: catchy, upbeat melodies and imagined unlikely scenarios for anthropomorphized yuletide characters.” Move over, Frosty! It’s beginning to look a lot like … an unseasonably warm December. Here is a brief history of Christmas songs and of their often-surprising rise from corny kitsch to global sensation.
Baby It’s Warm Outside
The Detroit Comeback
Writing for Popular Mechanics, our own Bill Morris “envisions the bright future of the great American city” he once called home: Detroit.
But I wanna have it both ways.
Alexander Nazaryan joins legions of hand wringers in this short rumination on children's reading and e-reading. Me, I just want it both ways.
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New Murakami Coming in August
Big news: It looks like Haruki Murakami's much-anticipated new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage finally has a U.S. publication date: August 12, 2014.
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The Great Goldfinch Debate
"No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?" Vanity Fair has big questions and lots of opinions about Donna Tartt's latest novel, which we've covered pretty extensively ourselves.
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Designing ‘The Laughing Monsters’
Continuing our conversation on book covers: a look at rejected designs for Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters.
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Translating Lorem Ipsum
Nick Richardson has some fun on the London Review of Books blog by discussing the challenges of translating Lorem Ipsum, a bit of filler Latin/Greek nonsense text that resembles an “extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroushian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans Wake.”
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Why Barry Writes
In the pages of Oxford American, the late Barry Hannah confesses to writing “out of a greed for lives and language.”