BOOK RIOT

It’s here, and it is spectacular. What’s the best book YOU read this month?

It’s the last day of our Kickstarter! Come enter the Last Day Giveaway to win the Cocktail Chart of Film and Literature!

It’s the last day of our Kickstarter! Come enter the Last Day Giveaway to win the Cocktail Chart of Film and Literature!

The List List #58
Critical Linking: May 24, 2013
Our daily round-up of bookish links. Tastes great with coffee. 

Reducing an entire genre to one person’s books as a source of comparison is limiting and reductive of the nuances, the depth, and the range of voices that exist within it. Believe it or not, John Green is not the be all, end all of contemporary realistic YA fiction.

I hope you have your nerdfighter repellant handy.

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One caveat is that Open Road wants to run special sales involving promotional codes — to give a reader 10 percent off a title, for instance. Friedman said that with the exception of Sony, the retailers don’t support these yet, and so Open Road might run a limited number of promotions itself in the future.

Man, it’s stupid that online retailers don’t support promotional codes. This would work, folks.

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If readers upgrade their ‘phone or tablet then why should they have to buy the same book content again?

Ummmmm. You know you don’t have to do this, right? You’ve heard of apps, right?

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At the time of the final Borders store closings in September 2011, Borders had approximately 17.7 million outstanding gift cards with unredeemed balances of $210.5 million.

You mean there are people out there that don’t use gift cards within 17 minutes of getting them? Freaks.

START HERE, Vol. 2 is Neil Gaiman-approved! 2 days left to back the Kickstarter!

START HERE, Vol. 2 is Neil Gaiman-approved! 2 days left to back the Kickstarter!

Mix your media with a new game inspired by Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken.”
Metafiction is Hilarious
Vaccaro Seeger (who’s brilliant First the Egg is an all-time great) pointed out that its “important to give children enough credit to challenge them—whether that’s using vocabulary that is not considered grade-level appropriate or challenging them conceptually and visually.” Barnett (who studied with David Foster Wallace) was especially excited about picture books as a perfect vehicle for experimental fiction (which is a particular soft spot of mine). Using the misadventures of Wile E. Coyote as an example, he said that while children might not get all the complexities of the joke, they laugh because, well, metafiction is hilarious. However, he also emphasized that the story still has to appeal to the young reader on a basic level because, “the stakes are high—if we don’t deliver [on other aspects of narrative], then they’ve been burned by experimental fiction.

A poetry skirt and a Bukowski onesie for your beatnik baby are just two of the delights in today’s installment of Book Fetish.