Tiny Books, an Incredibly Long Piano, and “Why Are Boss Fights So Damn Hard?”

This week’s “Linkfest”, wherein I hunt down finest online reading material

Yesterday, I skipped my usual Monday pub-date for the Linkfest, because in the US here I was on holiday!

But I couldn’t leave you folks all stranded. So here’s a good fun hour’s worth of intriguing reading material …

1) 📚 Tiny pocket books

Isolarii is a press that produces these adorably tiny paperback books. I’m a fan of really small paperbacks — back in 2013 I wrote a piece for Smithsonian magazine about how “pocket books” of the 1940s were the hot entertainment tech of the day, and how they presaged our love of portability with today’s smartphones.

If you subscribe to Isolarii, they send you a new book every two months — this one I’m holding (in this photo) above is by Can Xue, an avante-garde Chinese author; it’s a collection of wonderfully dreamy short stories. I’ve also got the wee book Street Cop by Robert Coover (illustrated by Art Spiegelman) and the novella Modern Animal by Yevgenia Beorusets.

In addition to being delightful to carry around, they are, quite like those tiny 1940s-era pocketbooks, pleasantly glanceable: The small pages have…