Isaac Babel gets a monument in Odessa. This is crucial: How Will Shortz edits a New York Times crossword puzzle. Rest assured that the redesigning of the IKEA Billy bookshelf is not the death of books. Edward Champion takes a look. The ten best books set in Istanbul. The 1990s really are back! Income slides to 1996 levels.
Electric Literature issue six is announced
Posted by Jason Diamond Electric Literature issue number six will be available September 15, featuring stories by Matt Sumell, Mary Otis, Marc Basch, Steve Edwards, and Nathan Englander. We should also mention the amazing cover art depicting what looks like the Gorton’s fisherman dressed as a clown, done by Sean Landers.
Library chic or book genocide?
Posted by Jason Diamond Hundreds of books died for fashion at the new Mulberry store in New York. (Via Refinery 29)
Coco & Ice T are the new literary power couple
Posted by Jason Diamond “A beautiful woman awakens on a plane and discovers that things are going terribly wrong. The plane is about to crash into the Hudson River and she can’t even remember her own name.” That’s the synopsis for Nicole “Coco” Marrow’s mystery novel Angel, which comes out today. Coincidentally, so does her husband Ice T’s book Kings of Vice. As a fan of Ice Loves Coco, “Cop Killer,” and Law and Order: SVU, I figured I should mention […]
Morning Bites: Rick Moody’s Crazy Rhythms, IKEA killing books, presidential libraries, and more
Rick Moody talks about The Feelies at The Rumpus. Little known fact: sometime in the Middle Ages, a blind prophet said that in 2011, the redesigning of cheap IKEA bookshelves would signal the end of books. Dan Sinker (@MayorEmanuel, Punk Planet) does Twitter fiction for Huffington Post Books. The Paris Review talks to Ishmael Reed about Juice!, his first novel in over fifteen years (on the always wonderful Dalkey Archives). Going to Germany to buy books. The Reagan and Nixon […]
Reviewed: The Postmortal by Drew Magary
Reviewed by Emily Goldsher The Postmortal By Drew Magary Penguin, 384 p. Deadspin writer Drew Magary’s new novel, The Postmortal, gives us one of many responses to the question, “what if we could all live forever?” Magary’s world without natural death is considerably grim, with cues taken heavily from the resource-hungry world of P.D. James’ The Children of Men. Narrator John Farrell is a nice guy, if not a bit of a loner. He’s somewhat of an upper-middle class everyman, […]
Morning Bites: Jane Eyre, Blake Butler, Seth Fried, dust jackets, a 13-year-old bluegrass prodigy, and more
The Jane Eyre that isn’t a feminist icon. Blake Butler talks to Impose. And when you’re done reading Blake’s interview, read Seth Fried’s interview at Freerange. Flavorwire gives us a collection of gorgeous looking dust jackets. The best fake literary Twitter accounts are… A video of a 13-year-old bluegrass whiz kid covering Gram Parsons is our favorite thing this Monday.
Morning Bites: Les Mis the movie, NYC Lit Crawl, Boutique Kerouac, Rushkoff’s “Jobs,” and more
We would be lying if we said that we weren’t really excited to see Wolverine in the movie version of Les Misérables. This Saturday is the NYC Lit Crawl. The Greenwich Village building that once housed beat luminaries Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Neal Cassady, will become a boutique hotel. At The Awl: Choire Sicha on Douglas Rushkoff’s “Are Jobs Obsolete?” piece: “He’s living in the Singularity already, so he can say that “on a very fundamental level, we have […]