“He says you should choose a book narrated by a person of the same gender as their primary master, played at average volume on an in-home listening device such as the Alexa-driven Echo device.” Cesar Milan is curating a list of titles for Amazon’s new Audible for Dogs initiative, reports USA Today. On the list so far: Pride and Prejudice, The Wind in the Willows, and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (via Book Riot).
Dog Whispering
Delicate Husk, Inconvenient Hair
Recommended Reading: “So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction” by Kaveh Akbar.
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Miranda July’s Somebody
Miranda July – whose new novel, The First Bad Man, is due in January – has developed a smartphone app that “allows one person to deliver a message to another.” The kicker? Someone other than you will deliver the message verbally and in person. (Sounds like she’s probably due before Congress once again.)
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“Gallop[ing] terribly”
We’re nearing the halfway point in football season (have you done your reading?), so that means it’s time to revisit one of the finest poems ever written about the game: James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.”
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The Book of a Young Girl
Anne Frank’s copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is up for auction, including her signature on the book’s flyleaf. “This book really is the springboard from which her nascent literary career and dreams of being a writer were launched,” said Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann Auction Galleries.
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James Cameron on Mars
Movies on Mars–that’s Avatar director James Cameron‘s newest project and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab will reap the benefits. At the Pasadena Star News, the story of how Cameron’s camera will give a 3D eye to the next Mars rover.
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Featuring Jimmy Carter
Kickstarters for creative projects run the gamut from endeavors like Star Citizen to requests for food or rent money to let a writer finish a novel. In between those extremes is this, a charmingly eccentric children’s book titled Pete Peanut and the Trouble with Birthdays, which needs help covering the costs of its ambitious design. You can also buy tailor-made birthday invitations or the title character’s own furniture.
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Write Across America
The folks at Write By Night are embarking on a quest to organize State Writing Resources (“from conferences to local critique groups to literary magazines”) for all fifty states in our nation. The first two destinations on the docket? Alabama and Alaska, respectively.
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