‘Book Bites’ for Monday 25th January 2010
January 26, 2010 by Rob
Filed under Book Bites, Book News
Fifty-Two Stories ‘break out’ a Kevin Sampsell short – Although I’ve still to catch up with the reading of them, it’s great to see that Harper Perennial are continuing their quest of dishing out quality FREE short stories every week on their Fifty-Two Stories website. This week they bring us Jailbreak by Kevin Sampsell, whose powerful new memoir, A Common Pornography, is out this week. I’ve never read any of Sampsell’s scribblings up to this point, but a story that begins with the line ‘I know everything there is to know about getting into jail’, has got to pique one’s interest, right? I’ll let you know what I thought of it, when I do eventually catch up.
Shiver Me Timbers! It’s a Book Pirate – Personally I find this whole book-piracy-is-going-to-kill-the-book-industry theory to be completely blown out of proportion, but it’s still interesting to keep an eye on the situation. We normally only really get to see that from the publisher’s point of view, but literary website The Millions offer us a different perspective by posting an interview with a bona fide book pirate. I do think the interview is somewhat sensationalised, as though the book pirate aka The Real Caterpillar is some kind of criminal mastermind, but there’s still some interesting stuff in there (aside from the step-by-step guide on how to rip off books *rolls eyes*).
“A Visit to the Studio of Rodrigo Corral” – OK, so I know it’s a few weeks old now, but I love this post on Cantos – the blog of New Directions Publishing – which documents a visit to the studios of ND’s Creative Director at Large, Rodrigo Corral. The post not only offers a bit of an insight into Corral’s way of thinking when it comes to cover design, it also lets us have a snoop around Corral’s studio, which for someone like me who just loves snooping around the work space of a creative, is priceless!
*note: the studio shots are on ND’s Flickr photostream. There’s a link in the post but you have to click through a couple of pages of images in order to get to them.
‘Book Bites’ – bringing you tasty bite-size morsels of bookish news and delight, from around the web.
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Rob, a self-confessed bibliophile, is without any hope of rehabilitation. He gets unnaturally excited over anything book-shaped, and if book sniffing were a crime then he would have been locked up years ago (which wouldn't bother him in the slightest provided his cell were lined with books)
The book pirate interview is indeed laughable for its sensationalism. I mean, a book pirate!
And The Millions, which I actually usually enjoy, makes it sound as if interviewing a Book Pirate (!) is an achievement. They are so many of them and there is nothing glamorous about pirating a book. It’s easy, just boring (and yes, totally unlawful).
Besides this, the article presented some interesting views, though nothing really new: “it’s okay, or at least feels like it, to steal from an faceless corporation”…
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