The stunning cover of Graffiti Asia by The SRK‘s Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan. The image doesn’t entirely do it justice as the ‘brown’ is actually spot metallic gold (I think it’s ink, but correct me if I am wrong):
(FULL DISCLOSURE: Graffiti Asia is published by Laurence King, who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).
The Best Film Books chosen by 51 critics for Sight & Sound magazine. The somewhat esoteric Top 5 is here.
The Death and Life of the Book Review — Despite being a well-ploughed furrow (and the predictable nostalgia for print reviews/skepticism about the web) this essay by John Paletta in The Nation is an interesting read, not least because he recognises that the culture of newspapers has downgraded book review sections:
The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves… In a news context, “anti-intellectual” does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can be that too. I use the word “anti-intellectual” to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.
The Host — KCRW’s Bookworm Michael Silverblatt interviewed in The Believer:
I’ve read all of the work, or in some cases as much of the work as is humanly possible. We all have time and deadlines, accidents, emergencies, but I read as much of it as I can. I’m very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don’t have time to do the preparation. And that is almost everyone who has a daily interview program. How could you read, or see, or watch, or hear as much as you need to? So, you wing it. And it’s not going to stop. Winging it is going to be the American way.
And speaking of Bookworm, Michael talks to David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto) and Anders Monson (Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir) about the “New Prose” on this week’s show (NB: I am posting this mostly because Anders Monson references my favourite scene from the TV show Futurama in the first five minutes of the interview):