This year’s Nobel in literature will be announced in early October, so there’s still plenty of time to get in on the gambling! Currently leading in all the over/unders? Haruki Murakami, whose book covers we considered here.
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Okay, but the Sample Size Tho
“It’s possible that when it comes to books, we have overestimated the means of delivery and have underestimated the importance of the content conveyed in the media.” A recent study demonstrated that preschoolers demonstrated the same level of reading comprehension regardless of whether the story they were, ahem, consuming came in digital or analog form, reports MOBY Lives. For more on the print vs. screen debate, see Alix Christie on the persistence of physical books; and of course it would be criminal not to mention our own founder C. Max Magee's killer compilation The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books.
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True Detective: “where time is a flat circle”
In addition to its overt references to Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow, HBO’s breakout hit, True Detective, seems also to draw from the work of a self-published poet named Dennis McHale. Or is it the other way around? (Bonus: Lincoln Michel drew up a reading list of southern gothic books similar in tone to the HBO series.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Millhauser; Gray; Percy; Flournoy; Obioma; Freeman; Thirlwell; Palaia; Jackman; Wong; Sendker
New this week: Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser; Gutshot by Amelia Gray; The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy; The Turner House by Angela Flournoy; The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman; Lurid and Cute by Adam Thirlwell; The Given World by Marian Palaia; The Winter Family by Clifford Jackman; Diamond Head by Cecily Wong; and Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
What’s Important
The Los Angeles Review of Books looks at a new history of K Records, the influential Olympia, WA-label that gave us Beat Happening, Modest Mouse, and Kurt Cobain's arm tattoo.
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The Congenital List-Maker
In true Seinfeldian fashion, Arthur Martine, the Victorian writer behind Martine’s Handbook of Etiquette, drew up a detailed taxonomy of the various species of bore. These include the Loud Talker, who “silences a whole party by his sole power of lungs;” the Malaprop, who masters the art of inappropriate conversation; and the Life-Sharer, who may be familiar to the Facebook addicts of today.
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The Count
"And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: 'Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.'" Wikipedia has got a women writers problem.
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