Caustic Cover Critic
@Unwise_Trousers
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90kg of relatively inert mass, obsessed with books; unpleasing to the eye. Too fat to ride a horse, too poor to run a carriage. My book:
Kaurna Country, Australia
Joined November 2016
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Just learned that as a child my dad was demoted from being Joseph in a Nativity play to being the innkeeper, due to bad behaviour, so, in revenge, when Joseph enquired if there was any room at the inn he yelled loudly YES, HEAPS
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Every now and then I reread this astonishing and terrifying description of the end of the dinosaurs, via
@PeterBrannen1
's 'The Ends of the World':
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The forthcoming Vintage Classics editions of Roberto Bolaño's books are very handsome things:
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I know this is like shooting fish in a barrel, but when these fash-adjacent “Classical” accounts turn their attention to the modern world it reveals just how threadbare their aesthetic judgements really are, just a list of crap bestsellers you could buy in the supermarket.
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7yo daughter, on being told she couldn't have a telescope fish as a pet as they're a high-pressure deep sea fish and various other reasons, so she made her own, called 'Boggles'.
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I'm sorry, but only crime novels featuring a dark house with a yellow light and some yellow text will be considered for publication from now on.
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The people next door are angling for us to remove our beautiful massive tree and so help me God I will take a chainsaw to the neighbours before I will let anyone touch this tree.
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Edith Wharton describes Henry James asking for directions:
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Oh, good people, do I have a treat for you: the confused covers of 'Sheba Blake Publishing': (thread)
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With a heavy heart I must tell you I did it again.
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It's time for a thread: the Big Book of Unfortunate Author Deaths
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"Can you explain this lengthy gap in your CV?"
"Yes. That's when I was carrying you."
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'The Family', Schiele's portrait of self (about to die of Spanish flu), his wife (dead of Spanish flu when six months pregnant) and baby (unborn, see above).
y’all what is a painting or other work of visual art that never fails to destroy you every time you see it because BOY I’ll start:
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My 106yo grandmother just died. She was responsible for getting free public libraries opened in South Australia. I found this quote from an interview she did about raising children in Australia during WW2.
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5yo daughter has been treating me with her toy doctor's kit: so far I have been treated for "goose bladder", "savage earlobe" and the dreaded "cushion problem".
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How many translations of Sappho does a man need? Apparently, at least one more.
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There should be a show called JUSTIFY YOUR SHELF where every week a TV crew breaks into a reader's house and picks a random bookshelf and forces the reader to justify why they have bought and kept every single one of those books.
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If a book is machine-translated, DO NOT BUT THAT FUCKING BOOK. If publishers are promising authors world access by machine translating their work, DO NOT BUY FROM THOSE PUBLISHERS. We need a blacklist to force these shits to stop.
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I have reached the age where looking at the autobiographies/memoirs in a bookshop, I have no idea who any of these people are, and all the books look like this:
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no-context photo of Patricia Lockwood scaring the Pope
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When you just want to clutch your head in a field in peace, and people keep slapping you on book covers:
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I made this for myself, and I'm not pretending it's a major part of her oeuvre, but if anyone wants all the comics that have been reliably attributed to Patricia Highsmith, I made a compilation of them you can download here:
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This is how I exit bookshops.
Armadillos collect leaf litter which they use to build nests inside their burrows
Their unique structure makes carrying things a challenge, which they overcome by positioning leaves against their abdomen and hopping backward towards their nests.
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for those who enjoyed and/or disbelieved this story, some more of my father's greatest hits:
My father once won a 'invent the least appealing dish' competition with the suggestion 'A CUP OF COLD FAT WITH A PUBIC HAIR IN IT'.
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Emily Dickinson artfully avoiding having to catch up with someone.
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Fellas, fellas, settle down, it's not a competition.
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When you want to lurk, pale and interesting, against a variety of backgrounds, but people keep slapping you onto book covers:
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If you are publishing a crime novel that DOESN'T have a dark house with yellow windows and yellow text, you are off to the gulag. I don't make the rules.
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About the only good thing in this world is that there seems to be no end to the supply of great mid-century women writers. (Admittedly often sadly neglected, but they're there to be found.)
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Edith Grossman’s PERSONAL LIST OF IMPORTANT TRANSLATIONS:
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So somehow I have to get all the things on the floor into the shelves before my wife shoots me:
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Just learned that the last time my father went through airport security they found a metal drinks coaster in his shoe that he didn't know was in there.
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What happens next is all
@wovenstrap
's fault. He suggested I do a list of 30 short but great books that can each be read in a day for someone in isolation/quarantine. So here we go!
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THREAD: Short story anthologies are, by their nature, invariably mixed bags, and there are plenty that have more chaff than wheat, to use two clichés in one sentence, but I thought it might be worth highlighting some that are really really good and worth getting:
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The latest depressing update:
If you are publishing a crime novel that DOESN'T have a dark house with yellow windows and yellow text, you are off to the gulag. I don't make the rules.
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How many translations of Sappho does a man need? Apparently, at least one more.
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I just learned that there is a single falcon feather on the moon, and I find that weirdly moving without being able to explain why.
An astronaut did the feather/heavy object falling at the same rate in zero gravity experiment, and left the feather where it fell.
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As far as one-volume collections go, this, due next year, would be pretty hard to beat.
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Milan Kundera as he is supposed to be read: with Andrzej Klimowski cover art.
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My thread of 75 neglected/not-well-enough-known but extremely excellent books that, in many cases, desperately need to be brought back into print:
1. LULU IN HOLLYWOOD: Louise Brooks - an actual worthwhile wonderfully written celebrity memoir in essays about being eaten alive by one famous role and the worlds of Jazz Age Hollywood and German Expressionism
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For fans of irony, this is what a literal Black Dog did to my copy of ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY when left unattended with it for 2 minutes.
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Why are so many writers on this site functionally insane?
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fuck this Nazi cunt and his stupid, stupid 4th-hand fuckwitted ideas
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So
@Jahaza
showed me this amazingly misbegotten cover for Hazlitt, and it led me down the rabbit hole of the terrible publisher Namaskar. Join me, won't you?
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..and some into the "it is conceivable that a human, while thoroughly confused and possibly not literate, was involved in this process somewhere" camp...
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Despite reading a number of his books, I don’t think I had ever seen a photo of Fosse until yesterday. He looks like one of those people who used to annoy Tolkien by ringing him up in the middle of the night to ask weird questions about elves.
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My dad googled himself recently and found someone saying "apparently he's a bit of a bastard in real life".
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Here we have a rare photo of a man working in the book mines, digging up new books to bring to market; occasionally such miners stumble on a “bestseller” which can set them up for life.
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Would people be interested in a sporadic daily thread spieling about neglected/little-known/forgotten books what are excellent?
YES!
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AWAY WITH YOU, BUFFOON!
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My dad at restaurant tonight:
"See over the road? That was the first-ever Hills Hoist factory. Just next to that is where I saw my first dead body."
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My dad just kept going on for ages about how much this agave thing bothers him, to general confusion. Turns out he meant agapē. This didn't really clear things up, but it did cast a different light on things.
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This looks like an almost algorithmically perfect fusion of at least 4 different depressing publishing trends, and will probably sell 6 billion copies.
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My favourite bookshop is up for sale and I'm half-tempted to somehow find a way to buy it and then ruin myself financially.
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Not an easy man, but a man who had a good point.
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Apparently I have been subconsciously pursuing this look:
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Human nature hasn't changed much in the 1500 years since these poems were written:
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Forthcoming Alison Bechdel cover for TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. I wish I liked this more.
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Me, reading with my tits out in my house of ferns
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The feeling when Baldwin's on the cover of your catalogue, but inside you're selling crap by Henry "dead cunt" Kissinger, Jordan "weepy psychotic fuckwit" Peterson, and David "solipsistic money-clutching moron" Brooks.
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When you just want to decorously lie nude on the gravel at night, and you keep getting slapped onto book covers:
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Imagine being this boring
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Could any book match up to the promise of this cover and title?
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I hate smoking but all the best author photos seem to feature cigarettes, I don't make the rules
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I don't think I've ever seen anyone less troubled by being trapped in a shame world.
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The idea that there's a how-to-write book that will encourage there to be more writing like this is enough to make it seem as though all writing should be banned immediately.
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Maddest book I ever read. A sea-serpent wrecks a ship, eats the passengers and some passing whales, gives the commencement address at Harvard, and then shocks society at a high-class ball. Partially in verse. Published 1850.
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There needs to be a name for the particular heart-sinking impatience you feel, when reading a book with 2 parallel narratives, every time you hit a chapter from the far less interesting one. “Argh, not these boring motherfuckers again!”
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Some of their covers fall into the 'almost got it, I can see where you were going' category...
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Fucking hell, the state of the bedside reading pile.
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My dad once wrote a children's book about X-rays, and the US version was not allowed to show kids' nipples.
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Just saw a list of "10 Famous Book Hoarders" and I have more books than 6 of them.
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Genuinely astonished to see this (excellent) book coming back into print: 1967 Scandinavian nuclear war novel about a luxury survivalists' hotel/bunker descending into fascistic chaos and disaster.
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Me reading that the author "divides their time" between New York and Paris:
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See, some might say it's NOT a John le Carré Novel, given John le Carré didn't write it.
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Holy shit, I forgot there was a whole second lot of unread books hidden behind this bookcase full of unread books.
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@Paul_Karp
And how many self-awarded little made-up little medals and ribbons is this fella wearing?
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I think I've detected the early stages of the next demented book twitter shitfight if anyone wants to get in on the ground floor.
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On reflection, I'm not at all sure that I COULD tell by the way someone used their walk that they were a woman's man with no time to talk.
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..and some into the "I don't know about literature but I sure like fashion" camp...
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Men who read books about books and buy books about books by men who buy books and sell books and write books (Always should be someone you really love)
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@jurassic_snark_
My dad once made Humphrey Bear say the only word he's ever spoken on live TV, a muffled 'Fffffuuuuck!', when he got a massive electric shock from getting too close to a Van der Graaff generator my dad was running.
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When bad covers happen to George Orwell: a thread
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