The Millions

Starting strong out of the gate with a new short story from Ben Marcus, Electric Lit‘s latest project, Recommended Reading is here! There’s also a single sentence animation and a letter from the editor.  And best of all, it’s published directly to Tumblr, though you can also read the story on your Kindle or ePub reader.

Stephen J. Gertz shows off some of Bukowski’s artwork; Sketches of F. Scott drawn by Zelda Fitzgerald and a portrait of their relationship by Anne Margaret Daniel; An interview with three of the more than 130 artists involved with The Graphic Canon, a series of illustrated literary classics.

Kate Heart has put together an array of charts breaking down the covers of 2011′s Young Adult fiction. Spoiler: the average book featured filigree and a white girl whose head is “mostly/ completely missing.”

In 1929 readers ventured that John Galsworthy was the author most likely to be read in 100 years. Why were they so wrong?

In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree ”in aggregate about the quality of a book,” non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be “more eclectic,” “more supportive of debut authors,” and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.

Kate Mosse announced that Orange will no longer be sponsoring the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, given annually to the best work of English-language fiction written by a woman.

The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming film The Master was released this week. The film will be about a mercurial religion called “The Cause,” and the whole thing appears to be based on L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology.

A release date for D’Angelo’s long-anticipated Voodoo follow-up is due any day now, so I really recommend checking out Amy Wallace’s stellar profile of the artist to stoke your interest.

As Rachel Syme points out, the person who made the Spotify playlist of every song mentioned in Patti Smith’s Just Kids deserves a free drink or two.

Wednesdays, right? Well, make your Hump Day a little more productive by perusing the digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. (via)

David Carr takes a look at The Atavist, whose team of multimedia gurus has won the attention (and seed funding) of Google founder Eric Schmidt. Of course, the outfit’s also been receiving generous attention for their quality work, too. (I mentioned them a few months ago.) More recently, however, certain scientific circles have fawned over the subject of their story The Electric Mind, which tracks one paralyzed woman and the scientists who developed the BrainGate technology which eventually got her moving… robotically.

The New Yorker’s book blog continues to host “Questioningly,” a so-called Twitter game show. The most recent installment featured the imagined Facebook status updates of literary figures, and was hosted by Ben Greenman. Who, might I add, is on a roll these days over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency too.