Friday follies
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Something strange is happening to mainstream fiction. This summer, novels featuring robots, witches, zombies, werewolves and ghosts are blurring the lines between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy, overturning long-held assumptions in the literary world about what constitutes high and low art.” I'm intrigued.
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is the selection to launch The Atlantic’s new twitter book club. Mashable explains the details.
You probably already know that Dan Sinker’s twitter serial @MayorEmanuel will be published in book form. Here’s the cover design.
The new, gracefully designed Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago uses mechanized cranes to retrieve books from underground storage with a turnaround time of five minutes. Take a look at the photos and short video. If your first reaction is that you’d rather sit among the stacks, consider that this is a research library, not a browsing library.
Enjoy a poem from poet laureate W. S. Merwin from Narrative Magazine.
Finally, a memoir suffers a series of rejections. Maybe just a few of us can identify? Read this piece by Daniel Menaker to the end for a smile.
