Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is “the book of the moment,” according to the staff of Houston-based Brazos Bookstore. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
Caw, Says the Crow
“Good evening.”
While you wait around for Hitchcock to hit theaters, you’ve got plenty of time to check out this online record of thirteen storyboards from the English director’s classic films.
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Pictorial Gateways
What is the best approach for creating a book cover? Over at Capatult, Tanwi Nandini Islam considers the best book cover for her debut novel, Bright Lines. Also check out this comparison of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
What’s “Appropriate”
We’ve been following the YA debate quite attentively – I wrote about it just last week – but Sarah Burnes‘s addition to the conversation, a blog post for The Paris Review, is one of the most eloquent I’ve read. In defense of reading YA fiction as a “grown-up” she writes, “The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self. I have not ceased to be the person I was when I was an adolescent; in fact, to think so seems to me like a kind of dissociation from a crucial aspect of one’s self. And the critic should be concerned with what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is not—not with what’s ‘appropriate.'”
The Orange Eats Creeps Mixtape
Christopher Higgs was teaching Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, and one of his students was inspired to make a mixtape featuring “the twisted, crusty, and often sublime characters found within the novel.” (The book, by the way, was one of my selections for Year in Reading last year.)
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Stalking Eileen Myles
Former Millions intern and current McNally Jackson bookmonger Rachel Hurn discusses “escaping from” San Diego with Eileen Myles. “The sixth time I saw Myles read, I told her I was stalking her,” Hurn writes. “I think she thought I was serious. Maybe I was.”
Selling Point
“The uncanny—not truth, beauty, or goodness—is literature’s boon.” The good thing about literature: it makes you weird.
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