Speaking Of Violence

Have you ever wondered what a book would look like only with punctuation? At Medium, Adam J Calhoun analyzes the punctuation in a few famous novels, complete with graphs for your viewing pleasure. For more punctuation, you could read our piece on the interrobang.

Canonical literature isn’t the only way to learn about America. The bestseller list can be equally as telling. Matthew Kahn is reading 100 years of No. 1 bestsellers from 1913 to 2013. He blogs about the books and discusses the project in an interview with Salon’s Laura Miller. When Miller asks what makes a bestseller, he claims, “A lot of it is just a matter of accessibility. A focus on plot and character rather than structure and the prose itself.”

In a new issue of N1BR, Nikil Saval takes a look at Rebecca Solnit‘s latest, calling its predecessor River of Shadows “surely one of the best books of the past decade.”

How’s your bracket doing? Upsets abound not only on the hardwood but also in The Morning News’s Tournament of Books. Celebrate your victory over lesser bracketologists (or, alternately, mourn your defeat against the onslaught of superior bracketologists) with this compendium of basketball poetry compiled by the folks at the Poetry Foundation.