Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that…
Source: blogs.hbr.org
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Flavorwire’s collected some great vintage book advertising, including this gem for Thomas Pynchon’s debut.
Source: flavorwire.com
New York Magazine’s Fall Books Preview includes a few Penguin Press titles, and we couldn’t be happier to share them with you.
Kathryn Schulz’s Top 5:Zadie Smith, NW
Are there any truly great British novels that aren’t about class? Maybe so, but I’m hard-pressed to think of them just now. Either way, Smith’s new novel takes up the national theme, following the intertwined lives of four characters who grew up in a council estate (that’s public housing, to New Yorkers) in the titular northwest quadrant of London. In White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith used class, race, geography, and gender the way Buckminster Fuller used triangles, borrowing their rigid forms and stress-distributing properties to build beautiful structures. Here’s hoping NW achieves the same. Penguin Press, Sept. 4.Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country
Chinua Achebe is best known as the author of Things Fall Apart, the most influential English-language African novel, but he is also a poet, essayist, short-story writer, and critic. Yet his writings remain largely mute on the Biafran War, the civil war that raged in Nigeria during the prime of his own life. This new book—part history, part memoir, part poetry collection—finally breaks that silence. Penguin Press, Oct. 11.
“And We’re Also Anticipating”:A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, by Errol Morris
Because the documentarian Morris is accusing canonical MacDonald chroniclers (like Janet Malcolm) of malpractice. Penguin, Sept. 4.
Governing the World: The History of an Idea, by Mark Mazower
Because a major work of history can also be a story of major tragedy, especially if it describes the dream of world peace under a rule of law. Penguin, Sept. 13.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t,by Nate Silver
Because, while we’re not prognosticators, we are willing to bet Silver will once again call this presidential race. Here, he explains why he’s so good at it. Penguin Press, Sept. 27.
What’s a Dog For?: The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend, by John Homans
John Homans explains how we came to live alongside, and actually love, all those mutt wolves. Nov. 8.
Source: New York Magazine
‘The Progressive’ by Alek Sennswald
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The search for an identity is one of the most wholesale phony ideas we’ve ever been sold. In the twenty-first century it’s almost entirely subsumed in its purest form of “brand identity”—for Levi to be “more black” would simply involve the purchasing of items connected with the idea of blackness. How can anyone be more black? Or more female? It’s like saying “I want to be more nose-having, more leg possessing.” People can only be defined by their actions in a world that contains other people. Sitting on a hill alone screaming “I am a Muslim in the 24–29 age bracket who likes Pepsi and sitcoms about loose bands of interconnected young people in my age group; I am a person who is French and into the things of Frenchness; I am a basketball player; a flower picker …” What does it mean? The Belsey children need to stop worrying about their identity and concern themselves with the people they care about, ideas that matter to them, beliefs they can stand by, tickets they can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful. The Belseys need to weigh situations as they appear before them, and decide what they want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.
— Zadie Smith, talking about On Beauty (via doubtlr, marginalgloss) (via onehundreddollars) (via thepenguinpress)
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Everybody knows what you mean when you say you’re happy or sad. But what about all those emotional states you don’t have words for? Here are ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain.
Source: io9.com
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My views of men have grown in some ways more lenient with the years, in some ways much harsher. I’m increasingly obsessed with the civilizing impact of women in history; as Henry Adams put it, we have ‘preserved the customs of civility.’ Throughout the millenia men have gone off to war and left us behind to preserve the tribal memory, to safeguard most social rituals that bond communities together. At times it’s even been up to women to purify language of the boorish influence brought it by their warrior men. Seventeenth-century France, when the women of the salons effected an immense catharsis on the nation’s spoken and written speech, is only a case in point. You see, I’m struck by how relatively antisocial men are, compared to women.
— Francine du Plessix Gray, author of The Queen’s Lover, from The Paris Review ”Art of Fiction No.96.” (via thepenguinpress)
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Source: theparisreview.org
