Matt Mullin

randomhousedigital: The Queen met 100s of representatives of...

Tue, 29 May 2012 08:47:47 -0400

The Queen met 100s of representatives of the arts, along with Joan Collins, Alan Bennett and Random House UK chief executive Gail Rebuck, at the Royal Academy of the Arts last night.

The Random House UK digital group has a new blog, led by the inimitable Dan Franklin. It’s worth your follow, especially for more on Christopher Hitchens’ new ebook only title, The Monarchy, out today.

kelsfjord: The Tallest Man on Earth covers...

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:03:17 -0400

kelsfjord:

The Tallest Man on Earth covers “Graceland.”

(via)

If Graceland didn’t change your life, I don’t think we can be friends.

kratlee: langer: jennydeluxe: thursday morning shopping...

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:08:52 -0400

kratlee:

langer:

jennydeluxe:

thursday morning shopping spree

lkjashdfglkjahsdfgkljahdfgljkahdfgasdfgh

matt, i think this would go really well with your locket.

YES YES YES.

"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:41:09 -0400

“You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California.”

- Joan Didion, in “Goodbye to All That,” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Oh Utah.

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:26:15 -0400

Oh Utah.

Come on, Internet.

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:15:00 -0400

Come on, Internet.

booksmatter: In college, one of my English professors...

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:49:31 -0400

booksmatter:

In college, one of my English professors threatened to institute a “sorry jar” policy for the females in his classes. Like the “swear jar,” the sorry jar would have required a monetary donation any time a female spoke in class and, at some point in her talking, apologized. Apparently his female students—strong, smart women in a top liberal arts college—often (unconsciously, accidentally) apologized, just for expressing their ideas.

In 2011, The Atlantic published 235 pieces men and 91 by women. Harper’s: 141 men, 42 women. The London Review of Books: 504 men, 117 women.

VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts compiles the above numbers every year, one of their many efforts to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women. Their first annual fundraiser, hosted by Riverhead Books, will be June 18, 2012, in Brooklyn. I suggest you attend—not only to drink unlimited beer and to mingle with Emma Straub but to support this organization and the women writers out there who, every day, are fighting to be heard.

A fantastic cause. Mark your calendars y’all.

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel."

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:04:00 -0400

Margaret Atwood (via sniffyjenkins)

"If someone were to ask me a year ago, I would have said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re not just a website —..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:19:32 -0400

““If someone were to ask me a year ago, I would have said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re not just a website — it’s this, and we have that, and the other.’ But I think it was when I saw mobile growing as fast as it was that it just sort of hit me at a different level,” Marshall told me. “Inevitably, as long as mobile was something like five percent of traffic, it was just something you made available on the side. But you start to see, this is going to be half of our audience. We can’t be approaching it in a way that the website is the thing, and we’re making imitations of it — because this thing is losing its primacy. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t until late last year that it hit me at a different level. It hit me as more than a concept. It was really true.””

- From When is a website not a website? For Talking Points Memo, the turning point was in 2012. An interesting way to approach all media, especially books.

This is a thing that is happening.

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:16:09 -0400

This is a thing that is happening.

zarifadam: Nicole Wong

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:21:32 -0400

zarifadam:

Nicole Wong

"This is where Joan Didion, “that consummate bard of cool,” spent much of her 20s living and roaming,..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:21:58 -0400

“This is where Joan Didion, “that consummate bard of cool,” spent much of her 20s living and roaming, drinking early in the mornings and pondering the “monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.” Where writers and filmmakers like Woody Allen gathered to see and be seen at the nightly salon that was Elaine’s—a place where, as Jay McInerney told The Guardian, “You’d go to drink, have fights and make out with someone’s girlfriend in the bathroom.””

- Kim Velsey, in The New York Observer, on why the Upper East Side is now cool.

brandspirit: 66/100: Marlboro Fascinating art project worth...

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:40:35 -0400

brandspirit:

66/100: Marlboro

Fascinating art project worth following.

Umberto Eco is reporting on twitter that Gabriel García Márquez,...

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:40:00 -0400

~~Umberto Eco is reporting on twitter that~~ Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, ~~has died~~ is alive! ~~As with all twitter death notices, I’m waiting for confirmation.~~ Julieta Lionetti tells me that the Eco account is a fake. Fantastic news.

Although there’s no bad reason for a picture of García Márquez with a black eye on your dashboard. Also, here’s a picture of him flipping off the camera.

The picture above is from the NYTimes, carrying the caption “Gabriel García Márquez in 1976 after Mario Vargas Llosa hit him.” The story behind it is one of my favorite literary anecdotes.

The final lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude remain the most haunting and beautiful I’ve ever read in literature:

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth

nevver: Attention

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:11:00 -0400

nevver:

Attention

Discombobulated: "Publication Date" by Franz Wright

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:03:00 -0400

Discombobulated: "Publication Date" by Franz Wright :

sniffyjenkins:

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead —
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.

"We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:15:11 -0400

“

We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.

In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.

The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.

Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?
And the sky going everywhere?

While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us.

”

- “Love in the Country” by William Stafford, from Stories That Could Be True

bookorithms: A lovely Book Week poster from 1924, designed by...

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:21:47 -0400

bookorithms:

A lovely Book Week poster from 1924, designed by Jessie Willcox Smith, who illustrated many children’s books.

thepenguinpress: Happy 75th birthday to Thomas Pynchon. The...

Tue, 08 May 2012 13:55:42 -0400

thepenguinpress:

Happy 75th birthday to Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press team heartily supports the Pynchon in Public initiative, which asks nothing more than for us to read V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, Slow Learner, Vineland, or The Crying of Lot 49 in public.

From today’s Writer’s Almanac on Pynchon:

“There are few photos of him in circulation, and much about him comes by way of rumor or anecdote. According to an account written by his college friend, Pynchon was obsessive about his teeth, and he studied with Nabokov at Cornell but couldn’t understand what he was saying. It’s been rumored at various times that Pynchon is living in Mexico, has died, or is really J.D. Salinger.”

7x20x21 at BEA 2012

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:51:47 -0400

7x20x21 at BEA 2012 :

amiwithani:

Once again, I will be hosting 7x20x21 at Book Expo America with my good friend (and closet breakdancer extraordinaire) Ryan Chapman.

If you’ve never attended 7x20x21 before, it’s an Ignite-style talk where speakers have 7 minutes and 20 powerpoint slides to tell you all about their current publishing obsessions.

Sadly, this event is open only to folks attending this year’s BEA in New York, but there will be video taken and I will post it here!

Statistician Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog at the NYT and should be the first thing you read every morning this fall

Shelia Heti, author of Ticknor and the upcoming How Should a Person Be? (download the first two chapters)

Robin Sloan, former Twitter employee, writer, media inventor, and creator of the much-lauded tap essay Fish.

D. T. Max, writer of the upcoming David Foster Wallace bio, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. (Read his New Yorker article about DFW.)

Dan Wilbur, creator of Better Book Titles, a blog which offers this replacement title for Much Abo about Nothing: ‘An Extremely Complex Lie Will Clearly Solve Everything.’

Jason Booher, book jacket designer and creator of the cover for Nick Harkway’s Angelmaker, which features an incredibly-hard-to-crack codethe solution to which will be revealed to the audience!

All followed by a drinks reception where you can hang out with the speakers and make time with other attractive BEA attendees.

Tuesday, June 5th

Downtown Stage at BEA

3-4 PM, followed by cocktails from 4-5.

BE THERE.