Books from their own imprint we hope. “In the last decade, in fact, the celebrity imprint has become something of a cottage industry, an endeavor mutually beneficial to publishing houses in pursuit of stars and their lucrative fanbases and celebrities looking for another feather in their cap.” Some of the celebrities on this list might surprise you, read on to learn about which ones have a publishing imprint.
What Do Celebs Read?
Catching the Muse, So to Speak
From Easel Orgy to Orgy in Oils, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech has rounded up dozens of sleazy paperback covers depicting artists intimately engaged in their work. (Side Note: it seems like the couple in Bride’s Dilemma is a tad overdressed.)
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Who Gets to Review?
“The best critics do more than explain why they liked or didn’t like a book; they try to understand books, and show other readers, by example, how to read and think about those books. Specialized expertise can work in service of that goal, but is probably not as important as a willingness to attempt to be a work’s most thoughtful reader.” Elisa Gabbert writes for Electric Literature about who gets to translate and review works and takes Kazuo Ishiguro‘s latest novel, The Buried Giant (which we reviewed here), as a case study.
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The Art of Hyping
Chad Harbach‘s The Art of Fielding is ubiquitous. We tapped it in our Second Half of 2011 Preview. n+1 bundled it with year-long subscriptions. The Awl interviewed the author. The New Yorker‘s Book Club picked it as their September book. It was reviewed in The New York Times. Now Keith Gessen‘s expanded his Vanity Fair piece on the novel’s development into a standalone e-book. In light of all this hype, McNally Jackson’s Tumblr provides a poignant list of baseball puns for reviewers to start avoiding.
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Salvador Dalí Illustrates the Western Canon
Few people know about Salvador Dalí's illustrations for famous works of the Western canon, including Don Quixote, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and even The Bible.
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Avoiding Unnecessary Punctuation
Over at The Washington Post, Jeff Guo makes a case against periods. As he puts it, “When we get excited, the pauses between our sentences shrink. We speak in run-ons. […] A period feels too weighty.” Also check out this Millions piece on the benefits of excising quotation marks.