Your Guide to Summer Movies Based on Comics

at CNN, The 10 Best Independent Bookstores in the US

at BuzzFeed, 50 Amazing Tattoos Inspired By Books

at BookPage, 10 Utterly Unforgettable Moms in Recent Literature

at The AV Club, 9 Alternate Universe Takes on THE GREAT GATSBY

at Paste, 10 Life Lessons from THE GREAT GATSBY

at AbeBooks, The 10 Most Expensive Book Sales of April

at Gizmodo, Six Beautiful Artifacts from the Dawn of Digital Typography

at The Huffington Post, 7 Underappreciated American Novels

at The Contextual Life, New in Paperback for May

at BuzzFeed, 20 Swanky Pieces of GREAT GATSBY Swag You Can Buy Online

Does using an initial or two in place of an author’s full first name, though, impact reader perceptions of the book or the voice within it? In other words, had S. D. Crockett’s After the Snow had her first name on it — Sophie — would readers see the book differently? Would they not believe the male voice?

I don’t think it’s a question of “believing the voice.” I think it’s a question of picking up the book at all. 

____________________________

Reviews, awards, and nods from important people in your industry are fantastic, but like a tree falling in the forest if you don’t tell folks about it, no one will know. Yes, you do often have to hit readers over the head with things if for no other reason than people are busy. Got an award? Shout it from the rooftops. Got tons of great reviews? Let’s see if that can be a stepping stone to something else.

I can’t even with this “hitting readers over the head” about how many great reviews you got.

____________________________

Every great book deserves a great cover. Sadly, many of the greatest classics in the public domain are left with poorly designed or autogenerated covers that fail to capture what makes these books exciting and inspiring to us. We’re asking illustrators, typographers, and designers of all stripes to create new covers for 50 of the greatest works of fiction in the public domain.

Cool idea. Go submit something, wouldya? Preferably something for a personal fave–The Good Soldier.

_________________________

Morning Train

1/2 oz NOLET’S Silver Dry Gin

1/2 oz Cointreau

1/2 oz Creme Yvette

1/2 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice

champagne topper

More cocktails (and trivia!) for the Gatsby-obsessed.

A horse that still can still inspire awe, centuries after its death (1). A wizard who uses numbers to battle the evils of superstition and defeat those held back by wilful blindness (2). A young who man heads off into the wilderness in search adventure, never to return (3). These are the stories that grab our imagination and won’t let go, the ones that are passed from one generation to the next, subtly shifting as they spread, becoming embellished and mutating with each retelling, until they become myths, leaping from mouth, to ear, to pen, to press, to the dazzling silver screen.

And then there are the stories that hold the wisdom of centuries past, apocalyptic tales of empires destroyed by accidents of history (4), or parables that reveal the troubled heart of our relationship with the very soil that sustains us (5). Tales that show how the follies of generations past continue to haunt our present and will be repeated in the future; how we are destined to make the same mistakes as our parents before us, and the children who follow us (6). And then there are the stories we really can’t live without, the ones that remind us of our cruelty and our blindness to other people’s suffering (7).

But surely those great stories belong to the distant past, a time of legends when great orators took the stage to speak of long-dead heroes, and we spent long winter nights telling tales of bygone days in hushed voices as we huddled round open fires? Or are those great narrators still among us, holding up a mirror to our world and captivating us with true stories more fabulous than any fiction?

When The Electric Typewriter (8) isn’t busy putting together needlessly opaque reading lists, it spends its time collecting the best articles and essays from around the internet (9) for your reading pleasure.

1) Four Good Legs between Us by Laura Hillenbrand 

2) The Trading Desk by Michael Lewis 

3) Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer 

4) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond 

5) 1491 by Charles C. Mann 

6) How Not to Talk to Your Kids by Po Bronson 

7) Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich 

8) The Electric Typewriter

9) 150 Great Articles and Essays (with links to over 750 more!) 

Mary Roach’s “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm” is one of the reasons why literary TED talks are the best TED talks.

Come on down and play Name Those Authors! for a chance to win SHADOW AND BONE!

Book designer Chip Kidd explains why designing books is no laughing matter (or maybe it is) and illustrated why literary TED talks are the best TED talks.