After an incredible meeting with Tumblr literary high priestess, Rachel Fershleiser, we are ready to unveil the shiny new Black Balloon Tumblr! On it, you'll find exclusive odds and ends from our books, outtakes from our blog, photos from events and parties, and anything worth reblogging from our literary friends and allies. To commemorate such an occasion, we've compiled a list of some of our favorite literary Tumblrs. Do yourself a favor and follow all these blogs immediately. Your cat-filled, Ryan Gosling-studded dashboard will thank you.

Title 2 Come: Gif blogs may be played out, but this literary-minded one is extremely relevant to our interests. Besides, any excuse to use this Ron Swanson gif is an Internet victory in our books.

Book Storey: For the extremely detail-oriented design bibliophiles, this collection of rare books will make you swoon. Recommended for people who spend way too much time in the Strand's Rare Book Room.

Fishing Boat Proceeds: YA author, John Green, is a Tumbly messiah, herding masses of “nerdfighters” to do outrageous things like register to vote and donate to Kiva. If you want to know that the kids are up to these days, jump on his bandwagon.

Underground NYPL: Forget the Sartorialist. This is the street style blog you want to be caught on. Subway riders reading, with the occasional e-reader thrown in for good measure.

Rachel Fershleiser: Obviously.

On the Strand: UK Penguin's Tumblr ain't the standard huge publishing blog. They post never-before-seen bits and pieces from their books, and if you're lucky you can catch an early glimpse of soon-to-be bestsellers, like they did with Zadie Smith's NW a couple of months ago.

The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart: Yes, he really did blurb this blurb blog. But this is handy to follow, should you ever need a crash course in book blurbing.

The Composites: “Images created using a commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters.” Either extremely beautiful or extremely upsetting, depending how you imagined Katniss Everdeen to look like.

Book Stalker: Again, obviously.

Bookshelf Porn: A visual case against e-readers.

Better Book Titles: One of the many Tumblrs that has went on to a (well deserved!) book deal but continues to post funny content.

Slaughterhouse 90210: Imperative for anyone who's ever wondered what would happen to the time-space continuum if Edith Wharton and Blair Waldorf ever crossed paths.

WORD and Housing Works: Two best bookstores on Tumblr. Extremely entertaining Twitter feeds as well.

1.

The line might be three people long or thirty. On a ninety-degree afternoon, we waited 45 minutes for second-row seats.

2.

"It's a film made up of clips from other movies," the line attendant told us. "Every clip has a clock, or refers to time, or implies time, and every clip happens at the same moment as the time it is outside. If you look at your watch and it says 2:15, a clip that takes place at 2:15 will be up on the screen. It's connected to a computer program to make sure that the film's always synchronized with the real-world time."

3.

Just before 5:00pm, Steve Martin pantomimed to his business partner that he had to leave for a 6:00 flight. At six, we saw him make it to the gate only to find the flight delayed. What Steve Martin was doing for that hour in between, as we watched clips from the 1960 version of The Time Machineas well as Casablanca and others—well, it’s not hard to guess.

4.

We couldn’t believe how much happened on the screen in ten minutes. How many people sighed, how many people answered phones, how many people watched clocks ticking.

5.

I meant to stay for an hour. The people in the couch next to mine got up and left. A woman sat down there and soon moved to the far end of her couch—a comfortably retired actress, I realized. Was she waiting for her cameo?

6.

We saw actors in different films throughout their careers. Glenn Close has changed. Robert Redford has changed. Meryl Streep has changed. Jimmy Stewart has not changed.

7.

I am a product of the eighties. I recognized the clips from The Matrix andNapoleon Dynamite. If there was any Orson Welles, it was lost on me. I nodded at a two-second clip from Sixteen Candles and a fifteen-second clip from Adventures in Babysitting. My parents are products of the fifties, as well as the decades after. Would they have been even more enthralled than I was?

8.

“Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.”

—Zadie Smith, “Killing Orson Welles at Midnight”

9.

The difference between good editing and great editing is a matter of discipline. Of course there are "good enough" transitions, but insisting on the perfect juxtaposition, just like le mot juste, makes a world of difference when attempted on such a massive scale. There is suspense embedded in the film clips, but Marclay's prowess is evident in the perpetual suspense of the cuts between them.

10.

“At Marclay’s request, White Cube posted a 'Help Wanted' sign at Today is Boring, a cinéaste redoubt on Kingsland Road. Six young people were hired to watch DVDs and rip digital copies of any scene showing a clock or alluding to the time . . . At first, he was merely collecting scattered files, but eventually he had enough to forge 'hinges' between them. The more hinges he came up with, the more inventive they got.”

—Daniel Zalewski, “The Hours”

11.

People punch the clock, hit the alarm clock, wind up the grandfather clock, open their pocket watch, move the minute hand forward and forward and forward. Robert Redford hits a baseball through a clock—although, in The Clock, the shards don’t fall in slow motion. It all happens in real time.

12.

“There was not actually such a thing as a second [in the film L'Avventurawhen a twentysomething Geoff Dyer saw it in Paris] . . . A minute was the minimum increment of temporal measurement. Every second lasted a minute, every minute lasted an hour, an hour a year, and so on. Trade time for a bigger unit of time. When I finally emerged into the Parisian twilight I was in my early thirties.”

—Geoff Dyer, Zona

13.

I emerged into the New York twilight three hours after entering, having walked past sleeping hipsters and snacking gallerinas toward the fading sunlight. I took the bus back to my apartment, and saw a row of clocksalong Fifty-Seventh Street, each one set to a different time zone. In my head, I could still hear the ticking.

image credit: flickr.com/billindc

Flavorwire posted a list of ten of the best books set in the Midwest, and since I’m currently reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (#1 their list) and residing in our nation’s heartland (right around where much of Freedom is set), I figured I could help those of you who are unfamiliar with this vast terrain. Here are five things that make the Midwest such fertile ground when it comes to novels.

1. The illusion of safety

Sure, there’s probably less crime (there are, after all, fewer people), but the Midwest is also full of folks less likely to report certain behaviors as criminal. If you have a character who needs to get away with some things, there are a whole bunch of Midwesterners more than happy to look away and tend to their own business, or the neighbors are so far away they’d hardly notice anything awry. This doesn’t mean privacy, exactly; it just means there is more space for those wanting to be left alone. Midwesterners gossip, but we usually don't ask questions.

2. Everybody knows your name

Everyone is in everybody’s shit all the time 'cause they all know each other and there isn’t much more excitement than other people’s shit. If you don’t share with everybody, everybody will talk shit about you. They’re all paying attention. Newcomers and committed outsiders are easy protagonists because it is easy here to rub against the grain.

3. Nature will scare the shit out of you

In the Midwest, nature isn’t just something pretty to describe; it's a force that no one can control and that affects everyone’s day-to-day life. Just askAnder Monson. Nature can be a legitimized mood swing or full-on devastation of life and home. Looking for a villain but don’t want to look too hard? Set your novel in the Midwest and look up. Or down. Take cover and build your ass a canoe.

4. Desire for days

A person cannot help but want something bigger, brighter, and more fantastic if they happen to be confined to the Midwest. Desire will not likely be satisfied here. There will be compromise. The Thai food will not fulfill even your lowered expectations (though if you try really hard you can get great Indian in Ohio and the Cambodian in St. Paul is phenomenal). There is always something better, on either coast, in any big city. All characters must want something, and if your characters reside in the Midwest, they inherently want more. And most of them want out.

5. Space and time (way too much of them)

This is how John Jeremiah Sullivan describes his home state: "when I say "Indiana"…blue screen, no?" There is little to blame frustrations on other than yourself, and yet there is also little to be distracted by, so you’re constantly aware of your own failure/discontent/alcoholism. What’s wrong is your soul: your natural, uncomplicated, and unfettered soul. In a true Midwestern novel, it’s not society that’s fucked; it’s people. I like to think of this as clarity, and it’s great for fiction that strips off the superficial nonsense and cuts right to the bone.

Image: foxnews.com

Both The Guardian and the NYDailyNews recently posted articles about a new study that seems to suggest that modern writers are becoming less and less influenced by past literature. In trying to come to grips with the terms of the study itself – ‘influence’ was measured by non-content word usage, measuring style not content, the sampling was of books available on Project Gutenberg that were published between 1550 and 1952 (which were then all written in English?) – I’ve come to a few of my own conclusions.

Conclusion #1 There are more people who know how to read and write now. Or, I should more accurately say, more people knew how to read and write in 1952 than there were people who knew how to read and write in 1920, let alone 1870, or 1660, etc.

Conclusion #2 More books became more available as more people had more time and money to read them. There were also an increasing number of people writing who weren’t rich white males, though I bet it was still pretty difficult in 1952 to get published if you were not male or not white.

Conclusion #3 Just because I have a shitty attitude about widespread generalizations based on out-dated source material quantified in meaningless ways doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get very upset and all up in arms about society crumbling because we’re all not reading the classics.

Conclusion #4 All of the people I’ve known who studied the Classics – as in Greek and Latin Classics – were incredibly dark and fatalistic. They were the smartest people I knew but by and large the most dangerously depressive.

Conclusion #5 Dead authors I’ve personally been heavily influenced by: Dostoevsky, Sherwood Anderson, Chekov, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Nabokov, Hemingway, Faulkner. Dead authors I could write like without coming off as a complete and total ass: 0.

Conclusion #6 Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow.

Image: sodahead.com

Looking at Liu Wei’s cityscapes made from old school books, I find myself flooded with a familiar sense of reassurance—of the calm that emanated from the cakey volumes on my parents’ shelves and the delicately preserved archives hidden in libraries. I like these cityscapes in great part because I like old books, and I like seeing things done with them.

Of course, I do have requirements. I wouldn’t want to see old books spliced into wet naps or shredded into lining for a bird cage. Shredded into sentence-sized strips to insulate a special gift, however, I might just get behind.

So. What other ways can we ramp up the nostalgic power and the functionality of our old books?

Aromatherapy. One of the most magical traits of old books is their smell. Part dust, part glue, with a dash of mystery, old books smell like a memory of family dipped in a kind of determined hopefulness. Why not treat old books like potpourri? They've already made the perfume.

Hiding your gun. Faux books have been around for a long time, hiding everything from money to drugs, but don’t you think it’s time to put that revolver in some vintage Chaucer? Or, if you're not the "Just Carry" type, take your precious volumes and chop them into guns. What else are you going to do with that frayed copy of Moby-Dick? Make a gun out of it.     

Protection. If you’re not prepared to chisel your old books into guns, they can still be used as weapons. The important part is to keep that stack by your front door to make it easily accessible when you need to clobber somebody. Also, if you don’t want to actually assault someone, you can just give them a stack with overzealous encouragement and expect to never see them again.

Insulation/Wallpaper. Okay. Some of the books in my collection I probably won't ever read again. Once they reach a certain age, I think it’d be a fair and lovely thing to paste them to my walls. True, I have lived in several severe weather climates where I've spent a lot of time blow-drying plastic to my windows. But how wonderful would it be to be surrounded by books, not only with slender spines peeking out from the shelves but entire walls of full covers?

While I'm quite capable of throwing away the most precious and sentimental knick-knacks, there's something about books I have a hard time letting go of. If I can class it up and make some art objects that also act as furniture, I could send fewer boxes off to storage. 

image: collabcubed.com

The new book How To Sharpen Pencils by David Rees got me thinking about what other guides might be useful to writers. The genius behind Get Your War On did, in fact, start a pencil sharpening business, and he subsequently wrote the instruction manual in the hopes that all of us might one day be free of the tyranny of not knowing how to sharpen pencils.

Since Rees has the pencil covered, I had to come up with something just as essential. My first idea was a book called How to Not Set Yourself on Fire. Unfortunately, this does not gel with my skill set. My second idea, which can’t guarantee you won’t set yourself on fire, might actually prove a tad more practical for writers struggling to make a living. I call it, Harnessing Your Inner Scrappiness.

Embrace the Loss

The first thing you’re going to want to do is let go of any notion that you will make enough money to eat and pay rent. Eating and sleeping in what society deems a decent shelter is for bankers and doctors. Stop fighting this. Just as what you own ends up owning you, once you live nowhere, you live everywhere. You don’t need a roof. Roofs are bourgeois.

Any Item Can Provide Shelter

I once slept underneath a deflated air mattress, utilizing it as a blanket, as there was no blanket. You know what it was? Warm. And waterproof! Sure, cardboard boxes are classic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use almost anything to cover and warm yourself. Give that trash bag a nice shake and tuck yourself in.

Any Item Can Be Clothes

Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have a personality. Discover your inner flair. Tie a bunch of shoes together to form a cape. Wouldn’t that discarded oil can make a lovely hat? Maybe you want to string used tissues into a scarf. Only your imagination can stop you.

Put It In Your Mouth

Teach your stomach to digest food alternatives. Start with natural substances like leather and wood. Synthetics are something you’ll want to work up to. Putting almost anything in your mouth will help saliva production, which is good for overall mouth health. And yes, there will be a lot of things you’ll be putting in your mouth. Lots of...things.

Befriend Rodents and Insects

Make nice with the scurrying inhabitants of the underworld. Not only do they know where the food is; if trained properly, they can also provide much needed companionship. The faster you learn to put up with all those itchy bites and strange rashes, the faster you can pretend you’re not talking to yourself. Which you are. A lot.

But maybe scrappiness isn't your thing. There are five gabillion how-to guides out there to show you how to, you know, do things. Perhaps you want to draw manga? Or maybe you haven't figured out how to eat stuff. Or yes, and this is probably necessary. Because you haven't figured that out yet.

Image: The Awl

Let's face it, book tours are weird and (sometimes) boring. On the Awl, nine authors and publicists talked about the best and the worst of the requisite book tour. Their consensus: there's something wrong with the whole setup. So step aside, dudes and dudettes. I'm not like regular authors. This is what I would do if I was on a book tour.

1.

If I was on a book tour, I would wear the same sophisticated, refined Yves St. Laurent suit to every reading. The same way I wear my Clockwork Orange costume for Halloween every year. (I probably wouldn’t stuff a sock down my pants for a book reading, though.)

2.

If I was on a book tour, I would only read the parts of my book with sex orhigh-speed car chases. Anybody can think about philosophical problems on their own. Sex and high-speed car chases, however, are best enjoyed ascommunal experiences. Also, one of my friends got lucky at a Literary Death Match event (probably one that Black Balloon publisher Elizabeth Koch ran, although she's not telling). All it took was a smile, a few literary allusions, and a round of vodka and Red Bull. That’s got to be a good sign.

3.

If I was on a book tour, I would interrupt discussions about my work to dish out Dear Sugar-style advice to the audience:

“Mr. Author, my marriage isn’t going so great. I’m reading your books like my wife told me to so that we have something to talk about when I come home from work. I don’t think it’s working. What should I do?”

“Have you tried stuffing a sock down your pants?”

4.

If I was on a book tour, I would drink a Tom Collins before I got in front of the audience (for the stage fright), and then I’d leave right after the signing for the nearest dive bar (for the non-stage fright). This one time, I met a bartender who was reading Ulysses when he wasn’t pouring shots. He was in the middle of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and managed to concoct an industrial-grade mojito while reading aloud her words—“What do they find to gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water”—and laughing the whole way through.

5.

If I was on a book tour, I would bribe my friends to come and be extremely attractive backup readers. They wouldn’t actually read though. They’d just stand around, being wonderful supportive friends. I’d tell them, “You can just stand up in front with me while I read about sex and high-speed car chases. You’ll probably get laid."

Come to think of it, maybe I'd stuff a sock down my pants after all. You never know what the audience is really there for.

image credit: leedsfestival.com. I would probably have a classier outfit.

The Hunger Games landed the number three spot on the recently released American Library Association’s Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2011. Um, hello? Complainers? My mom totally just read that book. My mom.

Maybe you think I’m being cute with the whole hunger-kitchen-mom title, perhaps playing the ol' wink-and-nod game, hinting at literary depravity and motherhood, so let me just stop all this conjecture right here and now. I am quite serious. My mom totally read The Hunger Games in the kitchen this weekend. Plus, if I were to imply any wink-and-nod business, I’d sound kind of sexist. Hell, you’re probably the sexist one.

For those zealots who might not immediately understand the implications of "my mom," let me provide a brief characterization. Elementary school teacher for over thirty years. Hates peanut butter. Also hates movies. Hates violence probably more than she hates movies. A major player on the social justice scene, pathologically invested in a Minneapolis Peace Garden.

That’s right. A peacenik school teacher with an aversion to nuts. DevouredThe Hunger Games in one sitting.

But how does my mom reading The Hunger Games have anything to do with you? When I asked her why she’d purchased the book, she said, “There are just some things you do for popular culture.” I don’t understand what this means. Some things you just have to accept without too many questions (like hating peanut butter). The day before I found The Hunger Games in the kitchen, my mother said she was going to “the labyrinth” and when I asked what “the labyrinth” was she started explaining what a labyrinth is rather than provide any concrete information about a physical place. She’s never even done drugs. Why would I think questions are useful?

Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to assume the following:

1. Rather than that idiotic No Child Left Behind bullshit of constant standardized testing, schools will start requiring demonstrations of physical prowess. Childhood obesity solved.
2. Popular culture will dictate moral standards. Oh wait, it already does.
3. The generation of nimble children raised by obese adults will inevitably take over. Our National Anthem will be replaced by Miley Cyrus humming.
4. I will find a Japanese horror film to write as a novel and make one million dollars.
5. Everyone will write a novel with the word "Game" in the title and make one million dollars.

Image: hungergamesmovie.org