January 28, 2013 On the Shelf Digital Diary, and Other News By Sadie Stein A digital edition of Anne Frank’s diary is rich with family photos from Otto Frank’s prewar collection. “The prisoners have as much of a selection as we can pack onto the rolling cart.” The library the NYPL operates at Rikers Island. Here is a pleasantly challenging Pride and Prejudice quiz. Also celebrating a landmark birthday: Grand Central Station. Its fictional legacy. “E-books are to actual books as pictures of cats are to actual cats curled & purring in your lap as you read,” tweets Joyce Carol Oates.
January 25, 2013 On the Shelf Allen Ginsberg Snaps, and Other News By Sadie Stein Should you fancy some of the two-foot letters from the recently disassembled Borders flagship sign, you can bid for them on eBay, with all profits going to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. And as someone who owns an S from an old marquee, I will judge you not at all. An exhibition of beat-era Allen Ginsberg photographs is on display at Grey Art Gallery. The captions, which read like speedy mini-poems, are the best part. The Following, a new Fox drama that features—along with Kevin Bacon and many other things—a Poe-obsessed serial killer, is probably no threat to the author’s legacy. However, it’s fun to read the tally of the show’s crimes against literature. “I haven’t read my rivals because I think it could be a deeply demoralising process,” quoth Hilary Mantel. Oh, and Judge Dredd might be gay.
January 24, 2013 On the Shelf Orwell at the BBC, and Other News By Sadie Stein It was all the rage! On the eighteenth-century literary vogue for suicides. “It’s pretty much all hopeless,” and other advice on writing a memoir. (Personally, I would say: throw in a few recipes.) Nineteen Eighty-Four has never been dramatized by BBC Radio 4 before now. Why? Maybe this has something to do with it: “Orwell partly based the book’s torture area, Room 101, on a meeting room in the building he remembered from his time at the BBC.” “The day will come when there’ll be private publishing houses in the Soviet Union.” A previously unpublished interview with Joseph Brodsky.
January 23, 2013 On the Shelf Gertrude Stein, Monster Hunter, and Other News By Sadie Stein Gertrude Stein, Gelatinous Cube Wrangler, and other possible monster hunters. The Brazilian government has allotted $35 million dollars toward promoting their literature internationally. Amazon’s fingerprints can be found, if one is of a suspicious frame of mind. “Some years ago, I found myself, to my surprise, the victim of a campaign of malicious e-mail stalking and online defamation by a former M.F.A. student.” We’ve heard of M.F.enemies, but one man’s tale takes the cake. “There are a lot of books out there that there is no particular reason on Earth why money should have been spent on them.” Barbara Meade, the longtime owner of Politics and Prose Bookstore, is retiring, and reflects on a life in books.
January 22, 2013 On the Shelf Parsing Middle Earth Contract, and Other News By Sadie Stein Listen to contemporary masters such as Charles Baxter and Siri Hustvedt read ten Sherwood Anderson stories. “Most of the topography turns out to be relatively straightforward. The Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith sits falsifying back-numbers of the Times, is the University of London’s Senate House building in Malet Street. Big Brother’s statue in Trafalgar Square, now rechristened ‘Victory Square,’ adorns the plinth previously reserved for Nelson, while the waxworks museum on the square’s eastern side, where visitors queue to inspect tableaux of military atrocities, is the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields put to sinister propagandist use.” Mapping 1984. “So far the dwarves haven’t committed any unsalvageable drafting errors or done anything that might jeopardize the validity of the contract.” A lawyer examines the dwarves’ contract from The Hobbit. “Write drunk,” and other (questionable?) advice from famous writers.
January 18, 2013 On the Shelf The Netherfield Ball, and Other News By Sadie Stein In honor of Pride and Prejudice’s two hundredth anniversary, the BBC is re-creating the Netherfield Ball at Chawton House, Hampshire. The unfortunately named Pride and Prejudice: Having A Ball at Easter, which will air on BBC 2, is for some reason ninety minutes long, and we would like an invitation. The Bell Jar, meanwhile, is a spring chicken at fifty. Philip Roth disagrees with most readers as to which of his novels are the best. What is the obsession with ranking things? May we rephrase? Here are a few of America’s best bookstores. If Mr. Eliot had to have a day job, why is it that writers and poets today are so cagey about what they do to pay the bills? Or, as someone at a Williamsburg party once put it, “What do you do—not for money?”