August 10, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Philip Levine is America’s new poet laureate. Save the Words is dedicated to bringing underutilized vocabulary back into circulation. A locupletative goal! The Popeye Cookbook is, not shockingly, heavy on the spinach. Bienvenue en France, Google Books! An unlikely hit: The Waste Land app earns back its costs in a mere six weeks. “I think it’s one of those things where you’re standing in a room, and you’re like, ‘Let’s make a new food magazine.’ And that’s a terrible idea. The world does not need a new food magazine … But if it’s such a bad idea that you can do a good version of it, then that’s a cool challenge.” An Edinburgh marathon reading of Theresa Breslin’s Prisoner in Alcatraz attempts to break the world reading record. Signs of a publishing rebound? John Burnside on researching a book: “I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.” Watch Britten’s Turn of the Screw, live. “There was something a bit Wellsian about photographs of riots and looting across London this weekend. Pictures of burning shops and broken windows and young men confronting uniformed police included crowdsourced images snatched by witnesses in the rapid, unexpected diffusion of trouble. The most dramatic, of Tottenham on fire and the blackened aftermath, are positively apocalyptic. To me, it all seems uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction. Even the place names have that quality of ordinariness that Wells exploits in his fantasy of a London apocalypse: Tottenham in flames, insurrection in Enfield, anarchy in Leyton and Islington …”
August 3, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, a start-up that converts books into iPad- and iPhone-friendly formats. “Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived.” Vote for the top one hundred science-fiction and fantasy titles. Anyone for retro cocktails? Joanna Lumley is raising funds to convert the home that helped inspire Peter Pan into a children’s literature center. In praise of small-town papers. Remembering Elizabeth Mackintosh—aka Josephine Tey, aka Gordon Daviot. Meet the new Spider-Man: Brooklynite Miles Morales. The New Yorker conquers the iPad. A guide to literary Edinburgh. #undatable—the literary characters you really wouldn’t want to date. Please judge these Virago Modern Classics by their gorgeous covers!
July 29, 2011 Bulletin The Beach Towel: Now for Sale! By The Paris Review We’ve heeded your wishes and, by popular demand, our super-duper Leanne Shapton–illustrated Paris Review beach towel is now available for purchase, yours for a very reasonable $20. But wait! For only $20 more, you can add a full year of fiction and poetry. That’s right: with the price of a subscription, the towel can be yours, free. The smartest towel of summer and reading material to match? That’s what we call a deal.
July 27, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Just where are Cervantes’s bones? Maurice Sendak’s new book, Bumble-Ardy. Is this the worst sentence of the year? The Man Booker Prize longlist is announced; it’s eclectic! The shortlist comes out in September. Let’s not forget the Not Booker Prize. This artist fought George Lucas, and won. “Award-winning science-fiction writer Alastair Reynolds is to delve into the past of Doctor Who in a new novel that sees the Time Lord in his Jon Pertwee incarnation taking on the Master.” And that’s not all: “new” Mickey Spillanes! After twelve years, Whit Stillman has a new film. Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig, will close the Venice Film Festival. “In an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover.” Grace Coddington sells her memoir for seven figures to Random House. Moist and other repulsive words.
July 20, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Jane Austen A cultural news roundup. An unfinished Jane Austen novel sells at auction for $1.6 million. The end of Borders. “Sigmund Freud, cokehead.” California schoolbooks add the LGBT community. So do Archie comics. The rock memoir is huge: can the Thin White Duke (or for that matter Ziggy Stardust) be far behind? Bowie becomes publishers’ “top target.” “We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history.” Entering the publishing world in the digital age. Longshot Magazine is back. A Harry Potter plagiarism case bites the dust. Frederick Seidel on a time before air-conditioning. A brief history of Pendleton. Alan Bennett: “I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there.” How to undress a Victorian lady. If the Paradise Lost adaptation is hell for Milton lovers, call Bradley Cooper the devil. The NewsCorp scandal: (almost) stranger than fiction.
July 13, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Theodore Roszak, a chronicler of the 1960s who coined the term counterculture, died this week at 77. Hugh Grant for Prime Minister. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest.” Penelope Lively calls Kindle readers “bloodless nerds.” In the spirit of “misery loves company,” the Web site My Unfinished Novels encourages frustrated writers to “share your creative failures.” Science fiction and religion. Harry Potter and religion. Miami artist Agustina Woodgate calls herself a “poetry bomber”: she sews tiny bits of poetry into garments in area thrift stores. “Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be,” she says. A brief history of title design. Reading retreats: book lovers’ dream vacations. Bill Keller is tired of his reporters who want to write books. Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca gets the Broadway treatment, for good or ill.