A new story by Hilary Mantel is always a cause for celebration. Good news: there’s one up now at the London Review of Books called “Kinsella In His Hole.” Huzzah!
Going On Eleven
Designing ‘The Laughing Monsters’
Continuing our conversation on book covers: a look at rejected designs for Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters.
The Dead and the Pre-Dead
"For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is." The Paris Review interviews Margalit Fox, a senior writer for The New York Times, on the complicated art of obituaries.
Certainly Got My Attention
Good Books is an online book retailer that donates all of its proceeds to Oxfam. It's also a big fan of trippy literary homage. In a collaboration with two creative studios, and without consulting the Hunter S. Thompson or Franz Kafka estates, the group's released a promo that draws on some of the most "out-there" elements of both writers.
Shenandoah Online
After publishing print editions for 60 years, Shenandoah has entered the digital game.
●
●
Not the First Ebenezer
Our own Kevin Hartnett has an interesting theory as to how Charles Dickens came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. At The Boston Globe, he looks at the evidence that Dickens got inspiration from the amateur writings of millworkers in Massachusetts.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Bezmozgis, Dyer, Professor X, Pletzinger, Still
New this week is David Bezmozgis's The Free World, the new Geoff Dyer collection of criticism Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (reviewed here today), "Professor X's" higher ed expose In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, Funeral for a Dog, a German novel in translation by young author Thomas Pletzinger, which John Wray has blurbed as "ballsy," and Chinaberry, a posthumously published novel by the Appalachian author James Still.
●
●
Seeing Sound
Have you ever wondered what a music note might look like? Now you have, so go and check out Resonantia by artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, a work which tests the limits of "cymatics—the patterns that sound waves induce in physical objects." One of Louviere's projects involved photographing the "shapes" of each of the 12 notes. Spoiler alert: G looks like a devil.