Lost Books, Indian Pulp, Vonnegut’s Atomic Bow-Tie, and More Lit Links

- The Smithsonian writes about the top 10 books lost to time, which includes works by Homer, Shakespeare, and Hemingway.

- Love love love these old Indian pulp covers (via The Millions).

- At The Millions, Emily St. John Mandel comes up with a pessimistic reading list:

There are always distractions, of course, but sheer escapism is too easy. I’d like to propose something more along the lines of semi-escapism. All of the following books are works of fiction, but there are moments, I’ve found, when fiction conveys nearly as much about the world we find ourselves in as the news does. With that in mind, a reading list:

- The Kindle Fire is here, and much cheaper than the iPad.

- The Rumpus interviews Jonathan Dee:

Dee: It took me a while to work that out as a technical solution to writing the long wedding-scene that opens the book. The idea in a nutshell is that what gives the scene its shape is not unity of perspective but unity of time—no matter how fluid the point of view, the clock in that scene never stops ticking forward. (Cf. DeLillo, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, and numerous other writers much better than me.) I thought briefly about trying to keep it up throughout the entire book, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that it was untenable, at least by me, for anything longer than a set piece.

- Bookforum interviews Helen Dewitt:

I think when one engages with a new language one recognizes something extraordinary: a person genetically identical to oneself could have grown up as a native speaker of this completely different language. So there’s the feeling that all the linguistic habits that one has internalized, that feel as though they ARE the self, could be displaced by something new.

- htmlgiant remembers Pindeldyboz.

- Can an online bookstore be a community bookstore? The Lit Pub is trying.

- Stephen King is working on a sequel to The Shining–a good book that was the basis for an amazing film–and apparently it is about elderly vampires. He read an excerpt at George Mason University last week that you can watch on youtube.

- Apparently before Kurt Vonnegut satirized the threat of global annihilation (in books such as the fantastic Cat’s Cradle) he had an idea to make money off it by selling bow-ties with nuclear symbols instead of polka dots.

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