![]() ![]() …a parasitic connection with other biographies about Hitler, Freud, and whoever I’m going to write the final biography on (either Tom Cruise or Frederick Douglass) at, the only viable marketplace in the twenty-first century publishing world… If somebody buys, say, The Freud Reader, which currently sells quite well at Amazon, and the same person buys Freud: The Penultimate Biography, thinking it’s similar to The Freud Reader, Amazon pools the titles together on its Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought page and a snowball effect ensues. This last part, Wilson admits, is flawed: “Blurbs don’t sell books.” What does sell books is metadata. ![]() They are experiments in deconstructing the supposedly cynical matrices of literature in the Internet age, where units are defined and shifted algorithmically, by guilty-sometimes arbitrary-associations with other books, and what Wilson calls Superior Authors. ![]() Certainly not biographies in the conventional sense of the genre, these titles may not be, strictly, books, whatever those are these days. Harlan Wilson’s trilogy of Hitler: The Terminal Biography Freud: The Penultimate Biography and Douglass: The Lost Autobiography are Magrittesque artifacts. ![]() Ceci n’est pas une livre… This is not a book. ![]()
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