Books I've actually finished* lately: 98

--
* which is more than you can say for Nabokov... [*klaxon*]

Books I've actually finished lately: 95

The publishing trade shouldn't just be guarding against Google, but against itself, against its increasingly fainhearted conviction about its own necessity.

- Roberto Calasso

[NB The Art of the Publisher (sic) is sent unto you by the same literary eminences responsible for this.]

Body and soul

One of the editors of the Enciclopedia Einaudi invited me one day to write the entry for 'body'. I told him I felt honoured and perplexed, and instinctively asked him who was going to be writing the entry for 'soul'. "There's no plan for such an entry," he immediately replied, as though I'd asked something improper. At that moment I realized we would never have seen eye to eye.

- Roberto Calasso, The Art of the Publisher

Books I've actually finished lately: 93

Ellmann's biography of Wilde was one of the first big books I read (/finished), aged about 16.

From which event extends a trail of more-or-less predictable consequences...

Books I've actually finished lately: 73

Favourite footnotes: 8

(A good dictionary and usage dictionary are strongly recommended. You're insane if you don't own these already.)

- David Foster Wallace, teaching materials (English 183D, Pomona College, 2008), in The David Foster Wallace Reader

Books I've actually finished lately: 62

1 x Happy Reader

Good shit. More or less free. Available here.

Books I've actually finished lately: 46

(Editor's note: Also, I have just named my first dog 'Maus', on account of how he looks exactly like the one on the left.)

Just. No.

An April Fool(!)

Mae Dappersonne introduces Penguin Now!, a new range of classic novels grammatically updated for 2014.

Should Penguin Now! prove a success, the team are looking into replacing the traditional ? with a more contemporary :/

[With thanks to Alexandra Coghlan]

Surrealest interview

INTERVIEWER: Clarice Lispector, where does this name, 'Lispector,' come from?
CLARICE LISPECTOR: I don't know. I asked ... It's a Latin name, right?

Kill all the Penguins!

Unbelievable.

A relationship

... two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

Black Swans

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan is a Penguin book, largely orange and white.