An incredible Flickr set of 20th Century avant-garde book covers (via Quipsologies).
The Lottery — Ruth Franklin, author of A Thousand Darknesses, on the history of the American bestseller for Book Forum:
Trends come and go, but the best seller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it. “As a rule of thumb,” writes John Sutherland, an English scholar who has studied the phenomenon, “what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else.”
Dystopia — Malcolm McDowell, Jan Harlan and Christiane Kubrick discuss the remastered 40th anniversary edition of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange with Guardian film critic Xan Brooks (video).
Multitasking — Wyndham Wallace on the demands currently placed on musicians for The Quietus (via BookTwo):
“When you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian,” another tragically deceased stand-up, Mitch Hedberg, joked, perhaps bitterly, “everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you’re a stand-up comedian. Can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’ It’s as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, ‘All right, you’re a cook. Can you farm?’” This is the position in which our musicians now find themselves. They’re expected to multitask in order to succeed. Their time is now demanded in so many different realms that music is no longer their business.
And lastly…
Old ‘Boofy’ Halberstam — P. G. Wodehouse’s American Pyscho at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
“What, old ‘Boofy’ Halberstam on some kind of psychotic killing spree? That’s hardly the sort of thing that would stand up in court—I mean to say, there was that business with the policeman’s helmet back at Harvard, true enough, but even so—”
“Not to worry, Patrick. You see, yesterday evening I took the further liberty of murdering Mr. Halberstam.”
I stood agog.
AGOG.
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