Advertisement

Sign In

Walk Like Updike, Live Like Lowell, Eat Your Words

By

On the Shelf

A cultural news roundup.

  • RIP illustrator John Griffiths. A slideshow of his Penguin covers.
  • Speaking of covers, Meg Wolitzer asks whether male authors garner better ones.
  • The best spokesman for an Ernest Hemingway novel? Papa himself.
  • The world’s first edible cookbook is printed on sheets of fresh pasta, blueprints for its own destruction that, when baked, turn into a lasagna.
  • Perhaps not shockingly, members of Russia’s Public Chamber have criticized a school notebook, part of the Great Russians series, the cover of which features an image of Stalin in military regalia. The publishers, defiant, point out that in a recent TV contest, Stalin placed third in a vote on the country’s “greatest historical figures.”
  • The Awl’s number-one tip for writing the Great American Novel? “Move out of Brooklyn.”
  • The big news in Salt Lake City was not that yours truly was there (although I was): luminaries of the horror genre converged on the Beehive State for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards, where writers Joe McKinney and Allyson Byrd won big.
  • In which Ian McEwan helps his son with an essay on one of his own novels … and gets “a very low mark.”
  • Sylvia Plath slept here (and take a peek into fourteen other writers’ bedrooms).
  • Robert Lowell wrote here—on Manhattan’s West Sixty-seventh Street—and it can be yours for $685,000.
  • The Little House books are canonical—literally. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical series join the Library of America.
  • John Updike predicted New York’s newly announced 6 1/2 Avenue in a 1956 New Yorker article: “As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue.”