October 30, 2012 On the Shelf Gun Found in Donated Book, and Other Book News By Sadie Stein When Indiana librarians opened a donated copy of Robert Stone’s Outerbridge Reach, they found it contained an Arma San Marco .31-caliber, a single-shot black-powder handgun. Reported reaction: “Oh, my.” Essential stormy-weather reads. Faulkner vs. Woody Allen: the plot thickens. How to care for old and lovely books. A breakdown of the megapublishing merger. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 29, 2012 On the Shelf Chaucer Invented the Word Tweet, and Other News By Sadie Stein Geoffrey Chaucer “provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb: of a bird: to utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously.” See this, and his other contributions to language, on this handy-dandy word cloud. Garcia Marquez takes Mexico City! (He already lives there, but the city is celebrating fifty years of calling Gabo a son with some forty thousand posters.) This flowchart outlines how to publish a book (and makes it look so easy and colorful!). William Faulkner and Woody Allen are in a feud. Okay, it’s actually the Faulkner Estate and Sony Pictures, which used a Faulkner quote in Midnight in Paris. Happy birthday, American Antiquarian Society.
October 26, 2012 On the Shelf Marilyn’s Books, Hemingway’s Vacation By Sadie Stein Hemingway sent this postcard to Gertrude Stein from Spain in 1924. A new version of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” has removed all references to Santa’s pipe. Just when you think you are too jaded to enjoy any more book arts and crafts … this. Happy Saint Crispin’s Day. Jonathan Franzen’s essay “House for Sale” has been adapted into a play and opened off-Broadway this week. Marilyn Monroe’s bookshelf.
October 25, 2012 On the Shelf Is Nothing Sacred? The Brontë Chapel Is Sacked By Sadie Stein The Brontë Bell Chapel, the seventeenth-century West Yorkshire church in which the literary sisters were baptized, has been looted by stone thieves. The crooks took the stones from the tops of graves, as well as from the walls of the building. Scholars at Oxford University may be on the brink of cracking the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system, a series of Bronze Age texts (in the original sense of the word). “I think it’s time for us to advocate for poetry!” Matthew Dickman’s call to arms. Here is a storyboard for The Secret History. Oh, and while we’re at it, here is a Hobbit-themed menu, coming to Denny’s November 6. “Start off your First Breakfast—or Second Breakfast—with six bite-size round red velvet Pancake Puppies made with white chocolate chips and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Served with a side of cream cheese icing for dipping.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 24, 2012 On the Shelf Pricey Real Estate, Cool Bookshelves By Sadie Stein We love a cool bookshelves roundup. Animal Farm, the movie: begin your dream-cast YouTube videos now, please. New (well, unheard, anyway) audio clips of Flannery O’Connor. Buy (or look at) the Mediterranean villa where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald allegedly stayed and wrote. Whatever, it has its own discotheque. How to write a novel in thirty days, should one have a furious gangster on one’s case or something. (Or should one wish to participate in NaNoWriMo.)
October 23, 2012 On the Shelf The Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone, and Other News By Sadie Stein Call now! How to Sharpen Pencils comes to a TV near you. Robert Gottlieb talks about editing the lurid novel The Best of Everything. “A Dog barks, someone eats a watermelon, a car drives away”: the signifiers of literary fiction. “Harriet Klausner claims to be a speed-reader. In the last decade, this former librarian has reviewed over 28,000 books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other sites.” On unmasking an online phenomenon. Following Mo Yan’s Nobel win, the Chinese government has announced plans to turn his childhood home into the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]