Jun 15th 2009

All Hail The Book Seer

bookseer

In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data):

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for

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Jun 3rd 2009

Josipovici, Rabelais and the Little Room

picture-1For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, 2006) is perhaps his most beautiful and mysterious work to date, a short novel which affected me profoundly. Written in Josipovici’s signature spare and compressed style, it deals with life, death, and art – particularly the intentions and what the publisher calls the “ambiguous…

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