May 2, 2013 On the Shelf Unpoetic Day Jobs, and Other News By Sadie Stein Day Jobs of the Poets. Have you seen James Patterson’s personally-funded “book industry bailout” ads? By a hair, print still trumps digital in the UK. “How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book.” One man’s story. Gillian Flynn: “That’s exactly my goal: to make spouses look askance at each other.”
May 1, 2013 On the Shelf How to Win at Moby-Dick, and Other News By Sadie Stein Moby-Dick: Or, the Card Game takes to Kickstarter. Related: Emoji Dick. Rules for literati. “These rules can be summed up with the overarching theme of Act Like a Normal Person.” How to procrastinate, Kafka-style. Braveheart, and other movies based on poems.
April 30, 2013 On the Shelf Fitzgerald’s Bookkeeping, and Other News By Sadie Stein “This is a record of everything Fitzgerald wrote, and what he did with it, in his own hand.” The University of South Carolina makes F. Scott’s financial ledger available on the Internet. (“Just weeks before the opening of the movie The Great Gatsby,” the AP adds, horribly.) In news that carries the ring of inevitability, Steven Soderbergh is writing a crime novella on Twitter. “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading,” says one concerned mother, about … Anne Frank’s diary. Haruki Murakami is set to make his first public appearance in Japan since 1995. A. A. Milne’s WWI propaganda career comes to light.
April 29, 2013 On the Shelf “All They Do Is Eat,” And Other News By Sadie Stein “It’s about eating lunch. They eat salad and cake. All they do is eat”: in which a two-year-old judges books by their covers. “He tends to devoice a lot of the fricatives, but I take that purely as an idiolectal variant”: an (in-depth) interview with the linguist who created Game of Thrones’ multiple languages. Fifty authors, including Hilary Mantel, Tom Stoppard, and John Banville, have contributed annotated first editions to an English PEN auction. Which is to say, they can (theoretically) be yours. The Henry Miller Memorial Library decamps temporarily to Miller’s hometown of Brooklyn for the Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge festival. Ishiguro on film, Tóibín on opera: six novelists on their second-favorite art forms.
April 26, 2013 On the Shelf Unlikely Aphrodisiacs, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The girls adored him and crowded out the benches, lying on the boards at his feet as there was no room to sit. He got them excited and, it was said, your best chance of seducing one was the afternoon of a Lewis lecture on medieval romance, the subject of his most famous academic work, The Allegory of Love.” C. S. Lewis, unlikely wingman. Nude tree-climbing and fruit flies: peculiar practices of great writers. George R. R. Martin unleashes his wrath on the New York Jets. Don DeLillo has won the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Win a Žižek tote bag!
April 25, 2013 On the Shelf Salinger Letters, and Other News By Sadie Stein “You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?” A new cache of letters by young J. D. Salinger comes to light. Granta editor John Freeman is leaving the magazine to teach. Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and free-speech advocate who defended both Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, has died at eighty-six. The strange mystery of the stolen books of Lambeth Palace. The Library of Congress (sort of) comes to terms with eBooks.