What could be better on a sleepy Sunday morning than catching up on the week's bookish news? How about being surprised with a book chosen just for you? Via Marc Schuster's wonderful Small Press Reviews: check out Small Press Roulette on Etsy: If you tell her your price range and the type of genre you'd like to read, Karen the (very excellent) Small Press Librarian will personally select you a book. Karen writes an outstanding small press, literary fiction blog - I imagine anything she sends would be well worth a read.
If you love the idea of old school, lovingly handcrafted, letterpress books, check out Printing Covers for (Kim Henderson's) The Kind of Girl, winner of this year's Rose Metal Press chapbook contest. The cover is gorgeous, and from my limited but extremely rewarding past experience with Rose Metal Press chapbooks (Tiff Holland's utterly terrific Betty Superman) it will surely also be well worth a read.
If ever you've read a book and fell as much in love with its sense of place as with its plot and characters, you will love Placing Literature, a new crowdsourcing project to map the literary locations in the fiction we love - add your favorite fiction to the map!
And if you've ever watched a book trailer but yearned for something a little more - Red 14 Films seeks to marry quality filmaking with literary fiction. They've launched a Kickstarter campaign to create literary short films for some terrific books (including the latest novels from two authors of whom I'm a great fan - Matt Bell and Monica Drake) - I'm so intrigued to see the films; you can help support the project here.
Finally, Julie Wu's recent essay "Give Me Plot, or Bore Me To Death" at Beyond the Margins resonated for me -
"I realized that different folks love reading for different reasons. And while the trappings of a story interest me, it is the story's emotional experience that I really love."I too, respond most to the emotion in books - lovely words with nothing moving behind them will lose me more easily than the imperfect telling of a story that grabs my heart. What do you think about Wu's essay, and what elements in writing do you most respond to?
Happy Sunday, and happy reading!
Some great links there, Jennifer! I particularly love the idea of the films, as I love short films and although I haven't watched it yet, Cheerful Weather For The Wedding really appeals - that sort of short literary book turned into a film. There's something really nice about films that aren't made with mainstream in mind (though they might work well there).
ReplyDeleteThinking on it I think I also respond to emotion, too, because if the emotion is only so so I'll really notice if a book has a stereotypical plot, but if the emotion and writing is right, the plot could be the same as another and I won't mind at all.
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