September 20, 2013 On the Shelf Substituting Russian Literature for Sex Ed, and Other News By Justin Alvarez Film still from Anna Karenina (1935). “Jonathan Franzen gripe” or “YouTube comment about saggy pants”? You be the judge. Forget condoms and turn instead to Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Gogol, according to a Russian children’s ombudsman. Says Pavel Astakhov, “The best sex education that exists is Russian literature.” The little-known original ending of “The Frog Prince” (spoiler: there was no kiss) sheds insight on why the Brothers Grimm were so grim. A Stanford University study shows evidence that today’s kids are actually writing longer and better essays than people in Twitter-less 1917. However, according to a recent Pew Research poll of teachers, children are also writing too informally. A defense of buying books and never reading them.
September 19, 2013 On the Shelf Vladimir Nabokov’s Butterfly Drawings, and Other News By Justin Alvarez Booktryst highlights well-known lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings. Has the Royal Hall from Beowulf been found? Archaeologists believe they now know the location of the hall where Hrothgar’s warriors once feasted. Cal O’Mara, Jerry Potts, Bob Lang: author D. W. Wilson lists the top ten absent fathers in literature. In feline book news, a cat procures the job title of “assistant librarian” at a Russian library. Perks include a raise in packs of cat food a month and “a spiffy bow tie.” “Well, that’s the end of the Booker Prize, then.”
September 18, 2013 On the Shelf The Hemingways Hold Grudges, and Other News By Sadie Stein Ernest Hemingway and Patrick “Mouse” Hemingway with a Gun in Idaho. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Quoth Patrick Hemingway, “I’m not a great fan of Vanity Fair. It’s a sort of luxury thinker’s magazine, for people who get their satisfaction out of driving a Jaguar instead of a Mini.” VF rejected his dad’s story “My Life in the Bull Ring With Donald Ogden” in 1924, and apparently the Hemingways hold a grudge; although Vanity Fair reportedly wanted to publish it, the story will run in the October Harper’s. “Insults from Kakutani about characters or the book or its author: 27.” Michi, by the numbers. NYU’s Center for French Civilization and Culture kicks off its “Re-Thinking Literature” conference tomorrow. Speakers include Ben Lerner, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joshua Cohen, and many more scholars, critics, and writers. A previously unpublished poem by Dorothy Wordsworth (poet, sister, and muse of William), “Lines addressed to my kind friend & medical attendant, Thomas Carr,” is on the Oxford University Press blog. Wordsworth was, at the time, suffering from arteriosclerosis and dementia.
September 17, 2013 On the Shelf Philosophy Turns Violent, and Other News By Sadie Stein During an argument over the works of Immanuel Kant, a Russian man was shot in the head. He is, shockingly, not seriously hurt, but the shooter faces up to a decade in jail for “intentional infliction of bodily harm.” The distinguished poet Graham Nunn—former artistic director of the Queensland Poetry Festival—has apologized for serial plagiarism. After getting caught. James Patterson: “I’m going to give away $1 million in the next twelve months or so, to help independent book stores. We’re making this big transition right now to ebooks, and that’s fine and good, and terrific, and wonderful, but, we’re not doing it in an organized, sane, civilized way. What’s happening right now is, a lot of book stores are disappearing, a lot of libraries are disappearing or they’re not being funded. School libraries aren’t being funded. This is not a good thing. It used to be you could go to your drugstore, you’d find books everywhere.” The president of the Ohio board of education is calling for the ban of The Bluest Eye by native daughter Toni Morrison. Debe Terhar calls the 1970 novel “pornographic.” Says Morrison, “I resent it … I mean if it’s Texas or North Carolina as it has been in all sorts of states. But to be a girl from Ohio, writing about Ohio having been born in Lorain, Ohio. And actually relating as an Ohio person, to have the Ohio, what—Board of Education? —is ironic at the least.”
September 16, 2013 On the Shelf The Real Hunger Games, and Other News By Sadie Stein Presented without comment: The Jewish Hunger Games: Kvetching Fire. (One comment: yes, it is about Yom Kippur.) Word is, the Man Booker may open its doors to Yank authors come 2014. Needless to say, this is controversial. Electric Lit starts an… irreverent take on Eat, Pray, Love. Marmee, Mme. Swann’s Way, and other great mothers of literature. Marshall Berman, an author and scholar whom the New York Times calls “a lyrical defender of modernism,” has died at seventy-two.
September 13, 2013 On the Shelf Tolstoy’s Instagram, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Princeton University library has digitized the manuscript of This Side of Paradise and made it available online. What if famous authors did have Instagram accounts? What indeed? Upon her death, an Ohio librarian quietly donated her life savings—one million dollars—to the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Annie Proulx is penning the libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain opera.