Ever since I saw my first stack of romance paperbacks at a garage sale as an impressionable Midwestern kid, I've always wanted to know who in the heck made them. Today, Barnes & Noble showed me.
Romance and fantasy illustrator Judy York gives these mass-market paperbacks that extra fantastical twist that makes you want to buy the book. Watching her in action, I thought about how novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote about a science fiction novel illustrator in The Fortress of Solitude, mining pop culture ephemera for literary gold. Thanks to Virginia Heffernan for the link.
As long as you're watching videos, Conversational Reading spotted this super-cool documentary about one of my literary heroes, Jorge Luis Borges.
Finally, Wyatt Mason wrote another thought-provoking post about book reviewing, asking a deceptively simple question about the great Philip Roth:
"I am curious over the methodology of its future reader-evaluators. How much of Roth’s prior work they will feel they should read before passing judgment on his latest effort?"
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