September 12, 2013 On the Shelf Ye Olde Grease Lightning, and Other News By Sadie Stein San Francisco-based Arion Press—the last full-service letterpress in America—is in pursuit of the perfect book. “Think of such trends in titles as the publishing industry’s version of ombré hair or white Chuck Taylors.” The word land in titles is all the rage for F/W. Let the record show: say syllabuses, not syllabi. “Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago.” Political turmoil has given birth to a new wave of Syrian poetry. In which college students act out scenes from Grease in Old English.
September 11, 2013 On the Shelf Saving the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, and Other News By Sadie Stein A federal grant will help the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center—based in the author’s Hartford home—to stay open. Middlemarch, in emojis. A map plots the location of every Booker Prize nominee since 1969. London leads the pack, at thirty-eight. Tumblr has launched a book club. Reblog kicks off with Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.
September 10, 2013 On the Shelf Bukowski on File, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The FBI kept a file on noted dirty old man Charles Bukowski.” Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose writing inspired the film Escape from Taliban, was killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday. “What I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.” At The New Yorker, excerpts from Flannery O’Connor’s journals. Satan, Humbert Humbert, Moby-Dick, and other curiously sympathetic literary villains.
September 9, 2013 On the Shelf Dr. Who Poetry, and Other News By Sadie Stein “We’re trying to reorder some of the myths based on the documents.” Bolaño’s unpublished work, on view in Spain. Harper Lee and agent Samuel Pinkus have apparenty reached an “agreement in principle” to settle the eighty-seven-year-old author’s copyright lawsuit. While he might have objected to their dissemination, here are twenty-two out-of-print J. D. Salinger stories that you can read online. A crowd-funded Dr. Who poetry book? Oh, it’s happening.
September 6, 2013 On the Shelf Tolstoy Goes Digital, and Other News By Sadie Stein All of Tolstoy’s works are going online. “We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,” explains his great-great-granddaughter. The work on the site will have been triple-proofed by more than three thousand volunteers from some forty-nine countries. This week, FSG has collected a lovely series of Seamus Heaney reminiscences and tributes—by Jonathan Galassi, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Maureen N. McLane, Robert Pinsky, and more—on their blog. Maya Angelou will be the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. UK charity shops are overwhelmed with a glut of Fifty Shades books—unrecyclable due to the glue used in their bindings. (Recommendation: find the nearest motel.) A new app allows self-published authors to add their own sound tracks and effects to audiobooks. For good or ill.
September 5, 2013 On the Shelf Secret Book Landscapes, and Other News By Sadie Stein These miniature landscapes, painted on the sides of nineteenth-century books, were recently discovered at the University of Iowa. Jokes (of varying degrees of hilarity) for grammar nerds. Adding to the indignity of Richard III’s parking-lot exhumation, scientists have now discovered that the monarch had worms. “Thy broken faith hath made the prey for worms,” wrote Shakespeare, calling it. Speaking of cross-pond exhumation! “Exhuming Poirot is disrespectful towards Agatha Christie’s careful burial,” argues John Sutherland in the Guardian.