publicity

Electric Literature just put together this animated trailer for the short story "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Wet Asphalt favorite Jim Shephard. It's... pretty damn awesome.

Full disclosure: Electric Literature pays us money to put ads on the site (but not to post things like this). Irregardless of that, I honestly believe that they are a pretty great literary magazine that appears to be doing everything right--and offering their magazine for a reasonable price in a myriad of formats including DRM-free ebooks. But most importantly they publish really good writers like Jim Shephard and pay him real money for the privilege. So go buy their first issue already.

Apparently, they could spring for John Oliver but not for a decent sound editor. Still, a good example of how to make book ads entertaining.

This book trailer is pretty amazing:

Still, neither that trailer nor the novel's website give me any solid description of what the book is about. Which, after that trailer, is what I really want to know.

Via GalleyCat

In honor of Reading the World 2007, an effort to promote literature in translation, many lit blogs are suggesting and discussing translated books. May I suggest the novels of Jin Yong?

Rachel Cooke asks recently in an op-ed piece in The Guardian if we "amateur word spewers" would really do without Nick Hornby who Cooke feels has set the Gold Standard for criticism to which no lit blog can aspire.

I feel confident in answering that yes, I would be quite content to live in a world without Nick Hornby and his brand of insipid, uninspired prose.

John Hodgman, in between being the "PC" in those Apple ads and his work on The Daily Show, is promoting the paperback of his book The Areas of My Expertise, which book I would probably praise, had I read it. To this end, Hodgman has put this video up on Amazon, which is damn funny, and created this magazine ad, which is a parody of this obscure George Plimpton ad for Itellivision from the 80's. The original ad, the fact of the parody and the parody itself are all three quite funny. A little less funny, but more poignant, is this address that Hodgman gave to a literary reading just after 9/11, published on McSweeney's in honor of the fifth anniversary last week.

Bonus: Also from McSweeney's, somewhat surreal new Mac ad ideas. (Remember, John Hodgman is the "PC Guy.")