Vonnegut-isms, Variety of Zombies, Nerdiest Protest, and More Lit Links

- Flavorwire on their favorite Vonnegut-isms, such as:

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

- The Awl takes a look at some secondary literary characters who almost met untimely deaths, such as Ron Weasley, who Rowling almost killed “out of spite.” Sadly, he lived.

- Bookforum talks to Colson Whitehead about his latest zombie novel, Zone One:

BOOKFORUM: Ok, tell me how your zombies really work in your mind. How were they created? How do they survive? And where are they all walking to?

COLSON WHITEHEAD: Starbucks? What I wanted to explain, I did. What I left out was irrelevant to my project. There’s no one zombie. Writers manipulate the creatures for their own purposes. The shambling hordes in World War Z do not serve the same end as those in Zombieland, the creatures of the original Dawn of the Dead are no real kin to those in the remake. They are vehicles of pathos, terror, social commentary, humor, or slippery metaphor, depending on who is at the wheel. Our monsters are multivalent and ever-changing. Like us.

- The Atlantic, via Flavorwire, has a kind of weird article about The Greatest Literary Figures With Literally the Greatest Figures. Do we really need to speculate about the hot bods of Victorian authors?

-A rad blog post on book jacket designing and Lolita from Jacket Mechanical.

- Online self-publishing is taking over China:

The ingenious part of this publishing model comes in when an individual author’s serial gathers a critical mass of readers. At this point the self-publishing site invites the author to become a VIP, and their serial moves to a different section of the site where readers can sample some chapters of their work for free, but have to pay if they want to read the latest installments.

- Lastly, if you live in NYC check out “the nerdiest protest ever” as writers read Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener in support of Occupy Wall Street.

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