The cover for Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel is now here

And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects.

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of January 27, 2019.

• At the Guardian, Sam Jordison considers why so many literary collaborations fail — and why Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett succeeded with 1990’s beloved and hilarious Good Omens:

While both Pratchett and Gaiman’s humour is often sarcastic, the book is anything but cynical. It’s warm and human, full of rage and righteous indignation, as well as delight in well-told jokes and well-placed silliness. “We didn’t do it for the money,” Pratchett once said. “It was done by two guys who didn’t have anything to lose by having fun.” (Although he also enjoyed noting: “But, as it turned out, we got a lot of money.”)

• Open Culture has Ursula K. Le Guin’s daily writing routine, and to be honest, I am jealous of it.
• At the Baffler, Becca Rothfeld considers the aesthetic sins of manipulative men:

Reading The Portrait of a Lady, I realized that it would be radical if we could learn to see male self-involvement as actively unattractive. Such a shift would require a revolution of perception. Gilbert Osmond is neither stupid nor tasteless: he’s precisely the sort of person who’s been glorified as rakish in endless rom coms. Yet his temperamental faults in fact soil what might otherwise amount to an immaculate beauty, and not simply by outweighing or overwhelming it. Gilbert is so rotten that his appeal is wholly vitiated. And as soon as I realized that his cruelty, snobbery, and emotional anemia made him not just evil but ugly — I was free.

• Here is a Little Free Library built into a tree trunk. I am ready to pack my bags for Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to admire it in person.
• At Book Riot, D.R. Baker writes in praise of reading on a noisy fire escape:

The first time my roommates and I toured our apartment, the fire escape caught my eye. Just off the living room, the narrow steel platform is a lovely perch from which to view the noisy northern Manhattan avenue we’ve recently begun calling home. I like sitting out here, among the music and laughter on the sidewalk four stories below; lit by the storefronts and street lamps unfurling before me toward the northern tip of the island; smelling my roommate’s ashtray and the restaurant across the street making arepas.

• Omar Ibn Said was a writer and scholar of Islam before he was sold into slavery in South Carolina in 1807. He wrote his autobiography in Arabic, and now you can see the original Arabic manuscript online.
• At the Millions, Ed Simon examines the history of alliteration in English poetry, and argues that it’s now undervalued:

If every language has this sonic sense, then poetry is the ultimate manifestation of a tongue’s unique genius; a language’s consciousness made manifest and self-aware, bottled and preserved into the artifact of verse. Language lives not in the mind, but rather in the larynx, the soft pallet, the mouth, and the tongue, and its progeny are the soft serpentine sibilant, the moist plosive, the chest gutturals’ heart-burn. A language’s poetry will reflect the natural sounds that have developed for its speakers, as can be witnessed in the meandering inter-locking softness of Italian ottava rima or the percussive trochaic tetrameter of Finland’s The Kalevala. For Romance languages, rhyme is relatively easy–all of those vowels at the ends of words. That Anglo-Saxon meter should be so heavily alliterative, along with its consonant-heavy West Germanic cousins like Frisian, also makes sense. Why then is rhyme historically the currency of English language poetry after the Anglo-Saxon era?

• At Vulture, Margot Boyer-Dry walks through book cover art in the age of Instagram:

It’s a classic rule of marketing: The more touch points a potential reader has with a particular book — the more times they see a cover posted by an account they trust — the more likely they are to buy. Consider a fairly recent Instagram success. “Alex Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is a book that people posted pictures of so many times that word-of-mouth became word-of-eye,” says Straub. “Not only would someone come in and say, ‘I’ve heard about this book,’ but they’d know what it looked like.”

• Speaking of book covers! The cover for Margaret Atwood’s forthcoming Handmaid’s Tale sequel has been revealed. I’m into the ponytail lady hiding inside the collar outline.
• At the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen discovers a dark and obscure children’s novella by William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride:

My five-year-old daughter often says to me, “Tell me a story about something that was going to be bad but then it turned out good.” (She makes this request on the way to the doctor.) Or, “Tell me a story of something that was going to be good but then it went badly and you were sad.” (She makes this request on the way to school.) Or even, “Tell me about something that was going to be bad but then it was good, but then it was bad, but then it was good, but then it was bad . . . And,” reluctantly, “then it was good.” I find these assignments very difficult, even though she considers losing a favorite sock and then finding it (then losing it again, but then finding it) to be a perfectly acceptable plot. It’s the emotion that is difficult. I find myself longing for something like “It was nice and nothing changed.”

Here’s a rundown of the past week in books at Vox:

• A 1951 book about totalitarianism is flying off the shelves. Here’s why.
• In this YA novel, the 6 wives of Henry VIII form a modern-day teen girl gang
• On Langston Hughes’s 115th birthday, read his ambivalent ode to America

As always, you can keep up with Vox’s book coverage by visiting vox.com/books. Happy reading!