What does the Man Booker prize mean for independent presses? On Salt, Saraband, and Oneworld, the three indie publishers with books on the Man Booker longlist this year.
Little Big League
Amazon’s Programming
Look out, network television. Amazon’s hiring creative executives to shepherd “crowd-sourced scripts” through development.
It’s All Volapük To Me
“‘A language without umlauts,’ he wrote, ‘sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.'” If Esperanto just doesn’t have enough umlauts, Volapük just might be the right made-up language for you.
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One-Night Reads
“Ever since, I have added a new layer of rules for my casual sex partners, especially when I end up in their space: I ask them for a book prior to exiting. I might phrase it more diplomatically, saying ‘I just want to read something on my train-ride back,’ or ‘I just finished my last book and I have been looking for the next one.’ Via this simple action I can estimate a lot more on a broad scale of very personal information and variation of taste than what I could possibly collect through hours of post-coital, emotional interrogation.” Seven books Elias Tezapsidis acquired through casual sex.
New Releases!
Tuesday New Release Day! New E.L. Doctorow, new Lorrie Moore, new Nick Cave, new (guest contributor) Michelle Huneven. And new in paperback 2666. Update: There’s also a new six-word memoir collection “by Teens Famous and Obscure” edited by Friend of The Millions Rachel Fershleiser
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Who Needs Music?
Continuing my trend of invoking Outkast’s musical stylings at least once per weekend, I now present to you Big Boi’s isolated vocals from “Bombs Over Baghdad.” (You can check out other isolated vocal tracks unrelated to Outkast over here, but I have to wonder why.)
Hors de Texte
I would like to nominate Sam Anderson’s riff on Roland Barthes’s Mythologies for the best lede ever. I would also like to order a tee shirt for a faux boy band composed of Lacan, Derrida, Barthes and Foucault.