Illustrious

From: LAMBIEK

"Argentinian illustrator Isol has beaten The Hungry Caterpillar's creator Eric Carle and War Horse author Michael Morpurgo to win the world's largest award for children's literature, the SEK5m (£500,000) Astrid Lindgren memorial award.

     Given annually by the Swedish government to an individual or organisation working 'in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren' to 'safeguard democratic values,' there were 207 candidates from around the world competing for this year's prize.
     Isol, born Marisol Misenta in Buenos Aires in 1972 and an illustrator, cartoonist, graphic artist, writer, singer and composer, was chosen by a jury of 12 international children's literature experts to stand alongside former winners including Shaun Tan, Philip Pullman and Maurice Sendak. Her books, according to today's announcement, expose the 'absurdities of the adult world.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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It's a jungle out there...

From: CoverBrowser

"Those who know the business are getting published. They don’t necessarily know the intricate mechanics of the book business but they understand who is reading and why. They write for someone. They do what is necessary to be taken seriously and to be comprehended. That means learning things like comps and pitches and queries. […]

     Study the dress and mating habits of publishing professionals. Mingle among them. Gain their trust. Attend writers conferences. Sit with agents and talk with them. Look at their jewelry and note the restaurants they mention. Listen to how they talk. Dine with them. Look at the writers they like. Note the kinds of jackets these writers wear. Consider buying similar jackets.
     Above all, make your text sing. Keep making it sing. Be stealthy and cunning and ruthless and keep at it and you will get this novel published the way you want it published and you and your agent and your publisher will all be happy."
— Cary Tennis, Salon
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“[...] let the soda crackers be soda crackers” [which] “are mysterious enough as it is.” — Saul Bellow

For the nineteenth time in nineteen years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to a writer outside of the US. As with most people in this country, the members of Still Eating Oranges were previously unfamiliar with the work of Chinese author Mo Yan. If he is as talented as last year’s winner, Tomas Tranströmer, then we have reason to be excited. As usual, though, a certain group (comprised mostly of Americans) has come out to criticize the Nobel committee for snubbing Cormac McCarthy or Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth. Those familiar with this annual tradition will remember that Roth, in particular, has become the cause célèbre for angry American pundits. The US has not had a laureate since Toni Morrison, the logic goes; and so there must be bias afoot. […]

     A certain literary culture dominates contemporary American schools and publications. In the past, we have considered a few of the effects—brutish, ironic and conflict-based stories—of this establishment. Its heroes and models are the world’s Roths, Raymond Carvers, John Updikes and Jonathan Franzens; its laws are 'subtext over surface,' 'sincerity kills' and 'realism trumps exaggeration.' It began to take off in and around the 1950s, popularized by the writing of Norman Mailer, Roth and others. It took root irrevocably in the following decades. This coincided with the rise of ever-more-unavoidable, ever-more-strict MFA programs and writers’ workshops, which indoctrinated at least two generations of writers into the same mentality.
     Today, peer pressure, school curricula, editorial taste and online writing guides ensure that new American writers all feed from the same trough."
— still eating oranges
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Past Perfect

From: beverlylewis.com

"[..] as I step inside the door, a shelf to my left offers a clue: Amish romance novels, all with covers depicting lovely Amish-clad Mädchen hovering over pastoral landscapes, line the shelves. A handwritten note on neon green paper taped to one shelf says, 'New! Lydia’s Charm.' Published by Barbour Books, the novel tells the gentle story of a widow who moves to Charm, Ohio, and is pursued by two Amish suitors, one a widower with three unruly boys and the other a shy bachelor. Lydia’s Charm is joined by Amish novels published by Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, Bethany House, Revell, Harvest House, and other evangelical houses.

     Most of these books, I discovered, were in fact written not by Amish authors but by evangelical Christians."
— Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Future...

"The future arrived much earlier in our house than anywhere else because my mother is an emerging technologies consultant. Her career has included stints as a circus horse groom, a tropical agronomist in Mauritania, and a desktop publisher. But for most of my life she has lived by her unusual ability to see beyond the glitchy demos of new tech to the faint outlines of another reality, just over the horizon. She takes these trembling hatchlings of ideas by the elbow, murmurs reassurances, and runs as fast as she can into the unknown.

     When the web and I were both young, in the mid-1990s (with 10,000 pages and a third-grade education to our respective names), video conferencing was my mom’s thing. We had our county’s first T1 fibre-optic line thanks to her, and I grew up in a house full of webcams, shuddering and starting with pictures of strangers in Hong Kong, New York and the Netherlands, to whom I’d have to wave when I got home from school. Later on, when I bought a webcam for the first time, I could not believe you had to pay for them — I thought of them as a readily available natural resource, spilling out from cardboard boxes under beds."
—Veronique Greenwood, Aeon
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For books by Richard Matheson and books about how we see the future — or how we used to see the future — go here...

"[…] like someone’s idea of a bookshop.”

From: eBay

"[…] The Monkey’s Paw specializes in oddities like Life-Spark Stories: printed matter that has fallen between history’s cracks and eluded even Google Books’ all-seeing eye. There are Victorian etiquette handbooks, antique sex manuals, obscure scientific treatises. There are forgotten 19th-century travelogues with sumptuous chromolithographs and leather-bound correspondence courses on fingerprinting. There are medical books (Hewat’s Examination of the Urine), how-to guides (Safety in Police Pursuit Driving) and historical studies: Drug Adulteration: Detection and Control in 19th-Century Britain, The Water Closet: A New History, The Puppet Theatre in Czechoslovakia. There are books whose accidentally poetic titles alone are worth the asking price: Prospecting for Uranium, Magnetic Removal of Foreign Bodies,  South Australia From Space. A sign in the Monkey’s Paw window dryly sums up the inventory: “Old & Unusual.”

     'This isn’t the store where you’ll find the book you were looking for,' [owner Stephen] Fowler says. 'It’s the store where you’ll find the book you didn’t know you were looking for.' You may find something else surprising at the Monkey’s Paw, too: a glimpse of the future, a way forward for the old-fashioned bookstore in the age of the iPhone and the e-book." [...]
     You could also say that the Monkey’s Paw is an idea masquerading as a bookshop. It’s a cross between a retail establishment and a conceptual art installation, which upends traditional book-trade values and views the literary canon through a cracked lens. It’s a bookstore that argues that bookstores are, by definition, Dickensian old curiosity shops.
     'Most booksellers can’t adjust to the postprint era,' Fowler says. “The only way to sell books in the 21st-century is as artifacts. I’m a 20th-century person myself, but with Monkey’s Paw, I’ve tried to adapt. This place is a church of print. It’s just that the old rules are a bit scrambled.'”
— Jody Rosen, The New York Times (tmagazine)
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Much like The Monkey's Paw, The Reanimation Library is trying to preserve and rehabilitate the unfortunate discards of a digital age.
     You can find them here...

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent presence library open to the public. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties."
— Reanimation Library
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Homeric

"By 1967, it had already been 11 years since Leonard Cohen published his first volume of poetry. He had also written two novels, and was famous enough back in his hometown of Montreal for the Canadian National Film Board to produce a biography of him called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. But when he appeared with Judy Collins at a concert in New York’s Central Park that summer, few in the audience knew much about him. Some knew that he wrote 'Suzanne,' a stunning song Collins introduced to the world on her 1966 album In My Life. What almost no one knew was what Cohen himself actually sounded like, since he had yet to release an album.
     […] As a record label head put it, 'You finish listening to a song of Leonard’s and you know [...] he didn’t let that song go until he’s finished with it.' Not so surprising, perhaps, in one who had been publishing poetry for a decade before he recorded music. And, with considerable success: his Selected Poems 1956–1968 sold 200,000 copies, [Sylvie] Simmons reports. But still, virtually no one makes a living from their poetry, so Cohen, then living intermittently on the Greek island of Hydra, plucked a string from the lyre of the oldest Greek poet of them all, Homer, and added music to the act."
— Tom Gallagher, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy this book, and all of Mr. Cohen's books here...