October 18, 2013 On the Shelf Fictional Food, and Other News By Sadie Stein Go Comics has put the complete Calvin and Hobbes archive online. Read on the site, or download the app. The novels of Nicholson Baker. In nail art. Can you guess which books inspired these fictitious food scenes? Or, the quiz some of us have been training for our entire lives. “To call these books essential is not to say that I believe everyone must read them, but to convey that they broadened and informed my ideas of what it means to be female and how the stories of girls and women are told.” Anna Holmes on five essential “lady” books everyone should read.
October 17, 2013 On the Shelf Click-Bait, and Other News By Sadie Stein College Humor improves bestsellers with click-bait titles (although we would have said Eat, Pray, Love was doing okay already). The rough guide to why Penguin Classics is publishing Morrissey’s autobiography. The most specific niche calendar ever created: “Tattooed Librarians of the Ocean State.” Herewith, famous books from every state. One in ten Icelanders will publish a book. As one young author tells the BBC, it can indeed get competitive. “Especially as I live with my mother and partner, who are also full-time writers. But we try to publish in alternate years so we do not compete too much.”
October 16, 2013 On the Shelf Awards Season Fever! And Other News By Sadie Stein At the Bookers, twenty-eight-year-old Eleanor Catton won the fiction prize for the hefty, historical The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever recipient. Meanwhile, stateside, the National Book Awards have listed their finalists. Bookish NYC gentlemen! There are still a few tickets available for Housing Works’s I Like Your Glasses: Literary Speed Dating, hosted, naturally, by CoverSpy. Ronan Farrow, activist, scholar, and son of Mia Farrow and someone else famous, is writing a book on military history. Pandora’s Box: How American Military Aid Creates America’s Enemies will be released in 2015 by Penguin.
October 15, 2013 On the Shelf Scandal at the Bookers, and Other News By Sadie Stein Behind the scenes at the Booker Prize! The lurid image is not misleading. We are not inclined to argue with the authority of this headline: “Here Is the One Perfect Book for Every Single Myers-Briggs Type.” “Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading.” Neil Gaiman on letting children read what they want. Crowdsourcing Tolstoy. “I don’t know what to make of it really. I’m a bit of an unlikely sex symbol. The mothers have all been coming up to me at the school gates taking the mickey out of me.” The teacher who inspired Helen Fielding’s latest romantic hero.
October 11, 2013 On the Shelf James Franco Is Garbo, a Novelist, and Other News By Sadie Stein At the Henry Review, Joshua Cohen reads from his novel-in-progress. A poetry shutdown begins, and poets and critics fail to reach a compromise. “It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s scale version of the world.” Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson. Ready or not: here is the book trailer for James Franco’s novel.
October 10, 2013 On the Shelf Alice Munro, Laureate, and Other News By Sadie Stein Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation called the Canadian writer (the second Canadian laureate, if we count Saul Bellow) a “master of the contemporary short story.” Ten things you need to know about Alice Munro. Need, people! Here is a BBC Listener magazine crossword set in Greek, from 1936. The prize was the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot. And no, no part of that would happen today. Semi-related: American adults are bad readers.