David Orr, who spends most of his journalism dough writing about poetry, has weighed in on the rise of fantasy novels, and on why George R. R. Martin dominates the New York Times bestseller list.
Did you know you can share books on Google+? You can. The Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog explains.
April Bernard joins a slowly growing group of authors—which includes Laura Miller and Brock Clarke—who have meditated on the phenomenon of the writer's houses as tourist destination. Bernard hates it, or at least the idea “that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.”
To commemorate Buenos Aires’s appointment as the 2011 World Book Capital, artist Marta Minujin has built an 80-foot tall, 30,000-book spiral sculpture in one of the city’s pedestrian plazas.
On the heels of @CondeElevator’s success, the New York Times’ fridge now also has a Twitter account.
Spoiler alert, defused: Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, wonders if giving the way the end of a book actually ruins our enjoyment of it. He cites new research, natch.
