“[L]isting The Bible proves detrimental for both sexes while listing Fifty Shades of Grey results in women getting 16% fewer messages and Harry Potter losing men up to 55%.” In recent duh news, a study by dating site eHarmony found that book readers are found to be “more intellectually curious than most and find it easier to form open and trusting relationships with others” – but not all books are equal, reports The Independent.
Richard Branson, Literary Cupid
Tuesday New Release Day: Walker, Somerville, Towles
Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles is out today, as is This Bright River by Patrick Somerville. And The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (reviewed here) is out in paperback.
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On “Cool”
Somewhere along the way, the word "cool" became "the most popular slang term of approval in English." Humanities has a pretty cool (hip, rad, dope, groovy, punk, hot, sweet) theory, tracing it as far back as Zora Neale Hurston's collection Mules and Men, and the time when "cool was black... cool was jazz." (Related reading: the most excellent Hepster's Dictionary (pdf) of 1939 jive talk, and our own history of the slang word "like.")
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The Verdict Is In!
Hurry over to the Tournament of Books to see whether Open City or The Sisters Brothers was this year's big winner!
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Tuesday New Release Day: Waldman, Kline
A pair of debuts are making waves this week. Amy Waldman's The Submission ponders an alternate present in which a Muslim man is the anonymous winner of the search for a design to build the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Ernest Kline's Player One is a "genre-busting," pop culture-infused take on the virtual reality future that awaits us.
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Congratulations friends!
Our friends over at the LARB have received two nods for the Pushcart Prize! Congratulate them by reading through the nominated essays: David Sheilds's "Life is Short; Art is shorter" and Antoine Wilson's "Notes on Hack."
Peter Matthiessen to Publish New Novel
Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen will publish a new novel in the spring of next year. Matthiessen, who won the National Book Award in 2008 for his last novel, Shadow Country, said the new novel centers on “a weeklong meditation retreat at the site of a World War II concentration camp.”
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Ben Jonson’s Virtual Journey
On July 8th 1618, Ben Jonson set out walking from London. Over the next few months, he traveled 400 miles on foot until he reached Edinburgh on September 5th. To commemorate the epic voyage, a team of researchers is re-enacting the walk online by updating a dedicated blog, Twitter page, and Facebook profile with a series of posts corresponding to dates, locations and occurrences Jonson experienced along the way. All this sounds grand enough, but I’ll be really impressed when somebody truly re-enacts Jonson’s mock-epic poem about paddling London’s disgusting Fleet Ditch: “On The Famous Voyage.”