other places, other things

My buddy Goodloe Byron, the cat that designed the cover for Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, has had an article written about his process over at Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes. In his delightfully self-effacing way, Bryon describes his thoughts about different versions of a cover he made for Matt Stewart's Twittered, and to be published by Soft Skull Press, novel, The French Revolution. If you've ever wanted to know what goes into choosing a cover for a book, this is the article for you.

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The new issue of Bookslut has a column by Charlotte Freeman on cookbooks, financial panic style, which of course never end up being entirely about the recipes. She mentions one of my favorite books, M.F.K. Fisher's restrained How to Cook a Wolf and two others by Patience Gray and Elizabeth David that I will have to get my hands on. I find books like these to be very heartening, as they are survivor stories with (mostly) happy endings. Isn't that what we all wish for?

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As a child, I thought often about messages sent and messages found, probably as a result of reading many, many mystery novels and living in a neighborhood bereft of civic pride and strewn with all sorts of written trash. Here, Quigley's Cabinet pulls together an excellent list of messages in bottles. I've always dreamt of finding one, maybe washed up on the rocky banks of the Schuykill or in a shark's belly, but I am probably too uptight about the dying oceans to send one now.