Our attention was snagged this week by a books website set up by two 27-year-olds who "got bored of boring jobs and hearing about rubbish books". Viola Fort and Katie McCalmont's Untitled Books sells an edited selection of titles divided into categories such as Coming of Age (try The Virgin Suicides or Great Expectations), and Desire (The Magus and Lolita, amongst many others). It's an attempt to give a bookshop-style touch to the online shopping experience.
But this isn't only a sales website, it also publishes an online monthly magazine, which currently features contributions from James Frey, Rabih Alameddine, Ron Currie and Steven Galloway, and an interview with Aleksandar Hemon. Next month we are promised Will Self, Ali Smith and Glyn Maxwell. There's also a lonely hearts page for the romantically inclined (rapidly becoming the new trend for lonely literary types, it seems, following Penguin's teaming up with Match.com). And we like its "literary seen", a collection of photos of people snapped reading around the country along with their thoughts on their choice of reading matter (Sam Bulpitt on London's Southbank is in the middle of Brief Lives by Anita Brookner: "So far someone has died, but considering the title, I guess there might be quite a few people who do.").
Pitching itself as a cross between a British McSweeney's, a young Paris Review and a New Yorker for the iPod generation, Untitled Books isn't shy (and it exists to sell you stuff), but it's worth a visit if you're in a quandary about what to read next or fancy a nose into other people's reading habits.
