Recommended Reading: A brief history of book illustration and books as objects, over at Literary Hub.
Image of the Text
Septuagenarian Akutagawa Prize Winner
Paging Sonya Chung and the rest of the Bloom gang: one of this year’s Akutagawa Prize winners is a seventy-five year old woman named Natsuko Kuroda. How’s that for a Post-40 Bloomer? (h/t Dustin Kurtz)
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The ‘I’ has to become ‘you.’
A great profile of Adam Gopnik and his work as an essayist in the Ryerson Review of Journalism.
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Borrowing Made Easy
A fledgling New York tech firm has invented a new service, Oyster, that the company claims is a lot like Spotify in its workings. Their innovation? The products they’re sharing are books.
That Was Fast
McCain speechwriter Mark Salter has been outed as the “Anonymous” behind the political novel O just two days after the book hit shelves.
Summer Comics Recommendations
July is the month of revolutions and upheavals, as Tom Nissley has asserted, so maybe you’ll want to change gears from reading literature and literary non-fiction to instead investigate some of the summer’s best comics. On this journey, Kevin Nguyen will be your guide.
Also, Empathy
Recommended Reading: In The Atlantic, Alaa Al Aswany shows how literature can inspire empathy by analyzing one word, “also,” in Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. Al Aswany also has a new book out this week, featured in our latest New Release Day.
An Unusual Inheritance
“They were still dressed for the funeral when their inheritance showed up.” Granta magazine has a new short story by Amelia Gray, whose literary rise we considered back in 2012.
Two Stars
“Few countries that debuted in the 1700s have been as controversial or long running (it’s into its 237th season now) as America. It may not have the staying power of perennial favorites such as China or the credibility of indie darlings such as Finland, but America has proven that it can at least make some cultural impact. It’s not the best, but hey, they can’t all be Louie.”
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