What Happened to Sophie Wilder, The Group, and The Best of Everything: The Awl rounds up the best recommended reading for newly minted college grads.
Inspired by sites like Groupon and Gilt, Amazon and other online booksellers have started experimenting with flash sales for e-books, cutting prices by up to two-thirds for a day or two and featuring them on homepages. The strategy has been a major boon for publishers, and “at HarperCollins, executives said they have seen books designated as daily deals go from 11 copies sold in one day, to 11,000 copies the next.”
In an essay for Britain’s Daily Mail, Virginia Woolf’s great niece claims that her aunt suffered from anorexia, basing the diagnosis off her own experience with the illness.
Amazon has unveiled plans for its new corporate headquarters in downtown Seattle, which feature three giant five-floor steel and glass domes. The structure, which would take about six years to finish, took inspiration from a number of sites around the world, including “a zoo in Germany and gardens in Singapore.”
At the New York Times Book Review, former editor Sam Tanenhaus is reminded of Henry James’s heroine Daisy Miller while reading Amanda Knox’s memoir about being accused of murdering her roommate while studying abroad in Italy. “Like Knox, James’s American heroine left observers wondering whether her angelic exterior masked ‘a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young woman,’ even if she was ‘very unsophisticated,’ as James explains, ‘only a pretty American flirt.’”
Over the past decade or so, Latin American novelists have gained international renown for fiction that explores the long legacies of military dictatorships. But now that many of these countries are now on relatively stable democratic footing, wonders Sam Carter at the New Republic, what does the future hold for the continent’s novelists?
