July 2, 2013 On the Shelf The Bible Sizzles, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Bible: soon to be a twelve-volume, two-thousand-page comic book with “sizzling art.” (Not drawn by God.) Toronto mayor and possible crack enthusiast Rob Ford has inspired a whole bunch of real-person fan fic. In surprising news, new research finds that the American under-thirty set is, in fact, more likely to read print than older demos. EdRants is publishing George Eliot’s novella, The Lifted Veil, in its entirety. Picador is turning matchmaker. The publisher will be running a “Love Shack” at the Latitude Festival, in which participants will be paired up based on literary tastes. Oh, and “people signing up to take part will have the chance to win a two-night glamping trip with Suffolk Yurt Holidays,” so…
July 1, 2013 On the Shelf Infinite Pagination, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Today I broke through the chains of oppression. No longer will page numbers tyrannize my life. I … have taken action,” declares one impassioned Infinite Jest reader. Would DFW approve? Meet Flaneur magazine, each issue of which is dedicated to a different street. In the words of the editors, “The magazine is aware of its subjectivity. It wants to say ‘This could be Kantstraße.’” Yeats, Austen, and Fitzgerald: all bad spellers. (Spellcheck will save contemporary authors from inclusion, presumably.) What do you read when trapped on a spacecraft? Garcia Márquez, of course. With audiobooks booming, actors start reading. Quoth the Times, “The field is so promising that drama schools, including prestigious institutions like Juilliard and Yale, have started offering audio narration workshops.”
June 28, 2013 On the Shelf Date Your Characters, and Other News By Sadie Stein Hogarth is launching a new series in which modern writers reinterpret Shakespeare. First up: Anne Tyler does The Taming of the Shrew, while Jeanette Winterson takes on The Winter’s Tale. In their own words: “We at Author’s Promoter thought it would be awesome if there was a site where you could check out characters from books and read up about them before deciding if you wanted to read their story; we also thought it would be pretty cool if you could find the type of characters you love to read about. In a way, we wanted to offer a ‘dating site’ for readers; we know that no matter how awesome the site gets it will always need more and more improvement adapting to readers and authors’ needs and that is exactly what we intend on doing!” The above is what we got when we selected “Male; asexual; human; 5’ 4”. So, n.b. If you’re more into blind book dating, on the other hand … E. L. James has overtaken J. K. Rowling’s perch on the mysterious Forbes Most Influential list. In which you were tricked into reading science fiction.
June 27, 2013 On the Shelf Area Man Returns Book After Discovering Wilde Gay, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Tweet pictured above really speaks for itself. And another one down: Chicago’s oldest used bookstore, the eccentric and beloved O’Gara and Wilson Antiquarian Booksellers, is closing its venerable Hyde Park location. But all is not lost: the shop is relocating to a more affordable location in Indiana. Here are mashups of chick lit and Marvel comics, because we live in a world unrecognizable to our great-grandparents. Speaking of! Subtle changes (degredation or evolution, you choose!) to the English language, happening as we speak. The Atlantic asks: Must every new coming-of-age novel be “the next Catcher in the Rye?” (Yes.)
June 26, 2013 On the Shelf Here Is Hemingway Getting Married, and Other News By Sadie Stein Flavorwire has outdone itself with this slideshow of authors’ wedding pictures. (Yup: that’s Hemingway and Hadley.) R.I.P. Nook—we hardly knew ya. (Which is, I suppose, the problem.) Reports of Leonard Cohen’s death, on the other hand, are greatly exaggerated. Beginning tomorrow, the Royal Shakespeare Company will begin tweeting out playwright Mark Ravenhill’s version of Candide. If this is the best of possible worlds, what, then, are the others? At Bookish, an exclusive peek into a day in the life of editor Amy Einhorn. Jane Austen may (or may not) replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note. She is, says Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King, “quietly waiting in the wings,” presumably for a spectacular, 42nd Street–style star turn that delights creationists the world over!
June 25, 2013 On the Shelf Map Your Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Café Kafka, Barcelona. A new app, Placing Literature, lets you find literary landmarks and bookstores wherever your travels take you. For your delectation: ten bookish restaurants. (We want to go to Café Kafka.) Everyone knows the original Little Mermaid—walking on knives, sea foam, and all—is anything but cute. At the LA Review of Books, scholars weigh in on the implications of Andersen’s grim tale. A tribute to that publisher’s friend, the subtitle. “The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times.” Verlyn Klinkenborg on the rise and fall of the American English major.