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A Book Lover’s Guide to IKEA seating

Say what you will about cookie-cutter culture, IKEA offers affordable furniture that doesn’t smell like the 1970’s. When enjoying your favorite book, it’s important to be seated properly — or at least in a way that compliments your reading experience. Here is a guide to what to read, and in what chairs.

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Expensive couch

This is a really expensive leather couch, ideal for books which reflect the opulent lifestyle, like American Psycho and The Great Gatsby. We learn in literature that money is not good, like all the bad people are rich and all the good people are poor. I don’t think this is a healthy attitude — now there’s some artistic nobility to being unemployed. I know I’m not your dad, but “get a job.” If I were the guy in American Psycho, I would not “freak out” (murder, crying into voicemail, etc.) and just keep my kick-ass job and eat good filet mignon at lunch and have sex with a lot of models.

What’s Up, Rumpus? Looking for Funny Women–PLUS–Stephen Elliott Explains Why He Writes

OPEN CALL: The Rumpus is looking for funny women:

Elissa Bassist talks about the under-representation of women in humor. Her consideration of this trend happily includes links to all seven (only seven!) female-authored Shouts & Murmurs columns of the past year. After you’ve read about the problem, you, too, will likely be hankering for a solution. Well, be your own solution! That is, if you’re a woman, and if you’re funny. Read the Guidelines for Funny Women Submissions to the Daily Rumpus . It says the deadline is September 15th, and then the “additional deadline” is never, because you should never stop writing. I’m not sure if that means this Funny Women thing will recur at Rumpus or if it just means you should love and believe in yourself–but stop bothering Elissa about it after September. Seems like the easiest thing to do would be to write something funny now, and not have to worry about it later. But that’s just me–and I don’t qualify.

Also, this is less by women, and less funny, then above, but it’s still really good. From “Why I Write,” by Stephen Elliott (click thru quote to essay).

In my junior year I dropped out of college to go to Amsterdam, where I found work as a barker for a live sex show. I wrote my first short story about that experience and, back at school, entered it in the undergraduate fiction contest. The story won first place out of 80 entries. One of the professors told me it was a good story, “but I can tell you’ve never been to Amsterdam.” I laughed at him. But now I can see what he means. The Amsterdam in the story wasn’t real—it lacked the specificity of detail that brings a location to life. But it was different from the other stories in the contest.

Uncategorized / 21 Comments
August 24th, 2009 / 10:09 am

Catherine Lacey

Racist Book Covers: An Update

Liar1 Last month Justin Taylor posted about the Justine Larbalestier cover controversy. (Recap: Larbalestier is an Austrailian author who’s YA novel is about to be released in America by Bloomsbury. Despite having a dark skinned heroine, Bloomsbury was all “Black people on book covers make them not sell” and they put a white girl on the cover. Larbalestier posted on her blog something like “Can You Believe These Chumps?” Instant controversy.)

So now Bloomsbury has changed the cover, despite having sent the white girl galleys out. There’s the new cover with a slightly European-looking dark-skinned lady on the cover. Now when I think of Bloomsbury I will just imagine Justin Timberlake with cornrows, trying to rap or prove that when called upon to do so, some white people can dance. Liar2

Author News / 16 Comments
August 23rd, 2009 / 10:07 pm

Justin Taylor

Mr. Kierkegaard’s Sunday Morning Service

Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something; if there were any question of accounting for its inner being, every such existence, however astounding its accomplishment, however much it can account for even the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoyment: every such life is none the less despair.

– The Sickness Unto Death

Power Quote / 35 Comments
August 23rd, 2009 / 8:52 am

Jimmy Chen

Power Quote: James Joyce

joyce

If you would like to read again, or (I’m hoping) for the first time, an excerpt from the penultimate chapter “Ithaca” in Ulysses, wherein Stephen (of A Portrait of an artist as a young man) escorts a drunken Leopold Bloom home, click after the break.

Audio Books

The other day I found this website that offers free downloads of audio books. Not an amazing catalog, but there’s some Nietzsche and a little Jane Austen.

I thought some folks might be interested, so I was going to post this as a little snippet post. But then, right before I pressed the publish button, I got to thinking about audio books.

How many people listen to audio books? How come indie publishers don’t do audio books? In our iPod frenzied times, I’d think there would be a huge market for that sort of thing – and it couldn’t be all too difficult or expensive to do, could it?

I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if I could go to PGP, pay a few bucks, and download a copy of A Jello Horse read by the author?

Or — even better/kookier, what if indie publishers asked authors to do author commentary, like director commentary on dvds? The author could walk through the book and talk about each section or something.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking with my fingers here.

Uncategorized / 31 Comments
August 22nd, 2009 / 10:24 am

Matthew Simmons