Just when you thought we’d covered every aspect of the story of self-publishing, something like this happens. A Canadian serial killer convicted of killing six women and charged in the deaths of another twenty has self-published a memoir on Amazon in which he maintains his innocence. The papers were allegedly smuggled out of the prison by another inmate and published by a self-publishing service under a pseudonym. Amazon has since discontinued sales of the book.
“The Fall Guy”
The Signature Smirk of the Absurd
This essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Kurt Vonnegut's "strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality" is certainly worth a read.
“She’s such a Hermione”
You probably knew a Lothario was a character before his name grew into a generic euphemism for "Guy You Don't Want Your Daughter Dating," but what about "brainiac," "mentor," and "pamphlet"? It turns out character names have been making their way into everyday vocabulary for thousands of years.
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Where We Read
From German photographer Christoph Seelbach, 24 jaw-dropping photographs of incredible libraries.
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The Perils of Word Aversion
Moist-haters, unite: why do some people despise the sound of certain words?
Writing through Dementia
Recommended Reading: Gerda Saunders's essay "My Dementia: Telling who I am before I forget" on being a writer with dementia. "Looking back at the chapters I’ve completed, I ask myself, 'How come I can still write? Could I be faking dementia?'"
Orozco Takes the Saroyan Prize
Post-40 Bloomer Daniel Orozco won Stanford’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing this week. His story collection, Orientation, beat out a murderer’s row of adversaries including Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West: A Country in Stories. Check out excerpts or stories from all three writers here, here, and here, respectively.
Curios
NPR offers a nifty gallery that accompanies the publication of this quirky collection: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.The Coen Brothers have signed on to helm the film version of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The big-screen version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found (though it's reportedly been in the works for years).Elsewhere in book-to-movie news, Ian McEwen is pleased with the film version of his novel Atonement.Poet and critic Reginald Shepherd reflects on becoming a blogger. "Until a couple of years ago, I barely knew what a blog was, and certainly had never seen one," he writes. But it proved quite fruitful: "it sometimes seems that my blog has done more to raise my profile than all my more-than-fifteen years of copious publishing put together."Five reasons not to give up books (the paper ones, as opposed the digital counterparts.)I think it's an ad for a video game, but this video contains some masterful soccer kung fu.None of us at The Millions is affiliated with Princeton, but this list of the school's most influential alums is interesting in a random sort of way.The new half-hour HBO show In Treatment is a free podcast at the iTunes store. The show stars Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist and each episode represents a single session with one of five patients.The writers' strike is over. The resulting carnage on the schedules for all your favorite shows is laid out here.
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Hospital Hijinks
Recommended Reading: The first chapter from Scott McClanahan's The Sarah Book, "OH MY GOD."
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