Is it another Beyoncé/Lemonade thinkpiece? Yes. Is it also more than that and worth your time to read? Yes. Terryn Hall at The Rumpus on Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, and being a black woman in the South: “Although Beyoncé is not ‘literary’ in a traditional sense, she’s using her power to usher in new black poetic (Warsan Shire) musical (Ibeyi, Chloe and Halley Bailey) and modeling (Jourdan Dunn, Zendaya) talent in a manner similar to that of the literary patrons of yesteryear.”
Another Southern Girl
Hot Amish Romance
Is it hot in here, or is that my Amish friendship bread? New York calls our attention to a new genre: the bonnet-ripper.
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The iTypewriter
Do you use a typewriter to tell the world you are serious scribe in the old-school mold, but do you also secretly adore the comforting glow, futuristic lines, and easy diversions of your iPad? Finally, USB Typewriter lets you have it all.
Revenge of the Plumbers
Don Linn argues that despite all the excitement surrounding new business models and shiny new ereaders, 2012 will be the “revenge of the plumbers,” as the technical infrastructure needed to support the ebook boom comes into focus.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Banville, Erdrich, Petterson, Meek, Helprin, Lehane, Cisneros, Sloan, Josefson, Bertino, Ware, Paris Review, BASS, Amis
October kicks off with a mega-dose of new fiction: Ancient Light by John Banville, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, It’s Fine By Me by Per Petterson, The Heart Broke In by James Meek, In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin, Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, and Have You Seen Marie? by Sandra Cisneros. And that doesn’t even include debuts Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, That’s Not a Feeling by Dan Josefson, and Safe As Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino. And there’s more: graphic novel master Chris Ware’s Building Stories, The Paris Review’s collection Object Lessons (we interviewed one of the Steins behind the book) and this year’s Best American Short Stories collection. Finally, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is out in a new NYRB Classics edition with an introduction by Keith Gessen.
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Covering Lolita
Disappointed by how few of the dozens of official book cover designs of Nabokov’s Lolita “correspond thematically to the novel,” blog Venus febriculosa is holding a book cover design contest (pdf) to create a new cover for Lolita and is awarding a $350 prize. (Thx, John)
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Semicolon Shenanigans
Need to spice up your writing? Try one of McSweeney’s punctuation marks such as the Yellow-Winged Apostrophe, which likes “to ‘peace out’ of its obligation to indicate possession or contraction,” or the Academic Ellipsis, which “is used by those who wish to demonstrate just how much more they know about how to use ellipses than you do.”
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