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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
20,000 readers of literary fiction…?
Rebecca Schinksy and I talked about this whisper of a rumor of a stat a few weeks ago on the Book Riot podcast, and Leigh Stein apparently had the same randomly, off-the-record comment get stuck in her mind. She tries to work through where this stat came from (a background comment in a review of a book) and what it means (sort of nothing, but also maybe everything). After thinking about it for awhile, I think the actual number cited is less important than the truth it represents: there are not that many people here in the States reading literary fiction. Some literary things break out and upmarket commercial fiction complicates matters, but the ranks of people who are interesting in picking up a mid-list literary novel that hasn’t been picked by a book club or something are thin.
Book It is Back and Has 1 Million Pizzas to Give Away
To commemorate 40 years of the single greatest thing ever conceived by a fast casual Italian restaurant, Pizza Hut is bringing Book It back, stocked with 1 million replacement level pizzas to hand out. The wrinkle here is that you don’t have to be a kid. Or read. And the pizzas aren’t actually free–they require a purchase of at least $8 to get. So really, this is just a shameless nostalgia activation for Gen Xers. You got me again, Yum! Brands.
You Are Going to Die
I am one of the people mentioned in this profile of Oliver Burkeman in The Atlantic: “His book is self-help for people who generally find the genre mockable, or at least unhelpful.” Burkeman is a sort of humanistic nihilist, at least when it comes to promises of productivity, life hacking , optimization. It isn’t that everything is meaningless, but rather so much of what we do for in making a life, career, job, or brand confuses, to paraphrase John Wooden, mistakes activity for accomplishment. It is Marie Kondo for your work calendar: could this meeting that could have been an email really need to have been done at all? And if you didn’t do it, heck if no one did, would anyone seriously notice?
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