Tag: jamie keenan

The brilliant Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan reveal the 20 irrefutable theories of book cover design. All of them are great.

Also at The Guardian: Ahdaf Soueif, author most recently of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, on fiction and the revolution in Egypt:

Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple. The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form. For reality has to take time to be processed, to transform into fiction. So it’s no use a story presenting itself, tempting, asking to be written, because another story will – in the next minute – come roaring over it, making the same demand. And you, the novelist, can’t grab one of them and run away and lock yourself up with it and surrender to it and wait and work for the transformation to happen – because you, the citizen, need to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, articulating.

The Last Book Sale — A charming piece for the NYRB by Larry McMurty, book dealer and author of The Last Picture Show, on an auction of his books in Archer City:

Everything sold but the fiction. Everyone who deals in fiction has plenty, and more is spilling onto the market from the sale of the Serendipity Bookshop stock now being dispersed on the West Coast. Many people asked me if I was sad to see so many books go. I wasn’t—mainly I was irritated to discover that I still had 30,000 novels to sell.

And finally…

 Put A Bird On It — The New York Times on the city’s boutique art bookstores:

perhaps because the physical book is coming to seem more like an object than ever before, the current landscape of shops blurs the line between bookstore and gallery in rollicking, unpredictable fashion. And because the shops are not nearly as tethered to high-end economics as art galleries, the mélange of stuff that results, some for sale and some not, can be strange and wonderful, like highly personalized cross sections cut from the culture at large.