Recommended Reading: J. M. Tyree’s new story at Guernica. “There’s a man on the bus sitting directly in front of you. He has a small brown spider crawling across his red shirt, near his left shoulder blade.” You could also watch our episode of The Book Report on Our Secret Life in the Movies by Tyree and Michael McGriff.
Addressing the Spider
Music Inspired by Literature
Have you ever wondered how Kafka’s The Trial would translate in music? Philip Glass adapted the novel, and more, to music. Read about other music inspired by literature at Ploughshares. For more on music and literature, check out our Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music column.
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Your Local Unpaid Librarian
“They would have closed, if the community hadn’t stepped forward.” The Guardian reports on the rapidly growing number of British libraries being run by volunteers, a trend driven by austerity cuts (which Corinne Purtill wrote about in these very pages just a few weeks ago).
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Roald Dahl Deals
Do you live in the UK? Well, if you can't afford Roald Dahl's writing shed, perhaps these two £0.99 e-books of his will suffice: "Royal Jelly" and "Man from the South."
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David Rees’s New Television Show
Get Your War On creator and How to Sharpen Pencils author David Rees was recently interviewed about his new show on the National Geographic channel. The premise behind the new venture is simple: “anything in the world that seems like there’s nothing to learn about, that’s what we want to learn about.”
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A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles
From Andy Warhol’s A to Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z (and now Tom McCarthy’s C), AbeBooks lists the shortest book titles.
The Art of the Recommendation
Laura Miller at Salon reports on the fine art of recommending books - “too delicate a task to leave to e-commerce robots” - and the literary types who are now stepping in to offer their advice.
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Okay, but the Sample Size Tho
“It’s possible that when it comes to books, we have overestimated the means of delivery and have underestimated the importance of the content conveyed in the media.” A recent study demonstrated that preschoolers demonstrated the same level of reading comprehension regardless of whether the story they were, ahem, consuming came in digital or analog form, reports MOBY Lives. For more on the print vs. screen debate, see Alix Christie on the persistence of physical books; and of course it would be criminal not to mention our own founder C. Max Magee's killer compilation The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books.