Out this week: Vacationland by John Hodgman; Funeral Platter by Greg Ames; True Stories by Francis Spufford; and The First Day by Phil Harrison. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hodgman; Ames; Spufford; Harrison
Steve Martin on the Banjo
Actor and comedian Steve Martin's album The Crow: New Songs for the Five String Banjo has been nominated for six International Bluegrass Music Association Awards. Listen to tracks from the album and read more about Martin's musical side at NPR.
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David Foster Wallace Syllabus
The Harry Ransom Center has scanned and uploaded the syllabus from David Foster Wallace's Fall 1994 section of English 102: Literary Analysis.
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Fully Secure
Recommended Viewing: Atlas Obscura’s gallery of libraries in which books are chained to the shelves. (h/t The Hairpin)
Kartika Review
M. Evelina Galang, author of Her Wild American Self and current director of the University of Miami's MFA Creative Writing Program, is featured in the latest issue of Kartika Review, "a national Asian/Pacific Islander American literary arts journal." You can read the entire Fall 2011 issue for free.
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Goodbye To All That
Benjamin Anastas has bid goodbye to the Twitter Village, and he thinks more writers should do the same. “There is a longing built into our online lives that can lead us to healthy attachments with multiple partners, a kind of polyamory of the mind, but it can also encourage the furtive transmission of waxed-chest photos and cock-shots,” he writes. “These are extreme examples of the kind of lonely misfires that Twitter allows, but I felt the temptation to seek comfort from my Twitter feed often enough to realize that it was only a matter of time before I did something embarrassing.”
Tell Us Something We Don’t Know
Interested in writing a bestseller? You may want to check out Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers' newest book, The Bestseller Code. Or maybe not: "At times, it seems like Archer and Jockers are trying to retrofit a closed system. They found that best-sellers have lots of contractions—the better, they explain, to mimic contemporary speech—and exclamation points only rarely ... They conclude that best-sellers consist of 'shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words,' and that best-selling characters 'make things happen.' Active verbs predict best-sellers better than passive verbs. 'Hesitation doesn’t keep pages turning,' Archer and Jockers decide. After all that work, in other words, the algorithm ends up confirming the uncontested tenets of craft and style."
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Occupy Wall Street, the Coloring Book
Wondering the best way to explain Occupy Wall Street to your 9-year-old? How about a coloring book? Out today, Occupy is a 36-page coloring book depicting the events and opinions surrounding the Occupy movement.
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