Spotted in Cambridge, MA: a bus stop advertising free, downloadable ebooks.
StoryBundle, a new service that lets you pay as much (or as little) as you want for preselected bundles of ebooks, announced on Wednesday that their latest bundle is a collection of writing about video games. Among other things, it includes two books by Jordan Mechner, the man behind Prince of Persia, as well as two issues of Kill Screen.
Epic Fail Aces Its Lulz Studies
“While others … have explored the more serious contexts of online humor, particularly when it tilts into the grim and mean, in Epic Fail [Mark] O’Connell makes a useful addition to what I’ll refer to as Lulz Studies by attempting to put this variety of Schadenfreude in cultural-historical perspective.”
Sam Pink, the man who got naked to sell his book, held a killer reading at Housing Works last week.
We’re thrilled by the early buzz surrounding Epic Fail, our first Millions Original eBook. You can learn more about the project courtesy of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Teleread. Of course, you could learn even more about the project by purchasing a copy of the book.
As the commercial landscape for books continues to shift, a prominent literary web site, The Millions, is celebrating its 10th anniversary by getting into the publishing game…C. Max Magee, the site’s founder and editor, said the next book published will be ‘a work of science journalism that investigates a mystery that for many years stumped NASA and physicists around the world.’
“Literary Web Site Enters the E-Books Fray,” says The New York Times.
1800s Scotland: He wrote about 200 poems, including his infamous ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature.
1900s Ireland: Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over-written, ‘purple’ circumlocutory writing style is alleged by some critics to be some of the worst prose and poetry ever written.
2000s America: After the video went viral on YouTube and other social media sites, ‘Friday’ was derided by many music critics and viewers, who dubbed it ‘the worst song ever.’
Dublin-based staff writer Mark O’Connell has penned an exploration of the Internet-era obsession with terrible art – bad YouTube pop songs, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and that endless stream of “Worst Things Ever” that invades your inboxes, newsfeeds, and Twitter streams. What, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More importantly, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite say about our aesthetic impulses? In setting out to answer these questions, O’Connell uncovers the historical context for our affinity for terrible art, tracing it back to Shakespeare and discovering the early 20th-century novelist who was dinner-party fodder for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Read on for the first chapter of The Millions‘ first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever.
Introducing The Millions Originals and An Excerpt of Our First eBook, ‘Epic Fail’
The Millions turns 10 years old this year, and to celebrate, we’re trying something new. The Millions Originals will give our talented writers a platform to publish as ebooks longer, magazine-quality pieces that will explore a variety of unusual and interesting topics. They cost just $1.99 and provide a jolt of entertainment that we hope will be worth much more than the price. Our ebooks will generally run about 15,000 words (a good deal longer than most magazine articles, but not nearly as long as a book). So please, hop on over here to learn a bit more about our first title and to buy it from the ebookstore of your choice. Or, read on for an excerpt, if you still need convincing.
To kick off our new series, Dublin-based staff writer Mark O’Connell has penned an exploration of the Internet-era obsession with terrible art – bad YouTube pop songs, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and that endless stream of “Worst Things Ever” that invades your inboxes, newsfeeds, and Twitter streams. What, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More importantly, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite say about our aesthetic impulses? In setting out to answer these questions, O’Connell uncovers the historical context for our affinity for terrible art, tracing it back to Shakespeare and discovering the early 20th-century novelist who was dinner-party fodder for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT of The Millions‘ first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. – C. Max Magee, editor, The Millions
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