August 23, 2012 On the Shelf The Most-Wanted Books of 2012 By Sadie Stein Madonna’s Sex is the most sought-after out-of-print book on Bookfinder’s 2012 report. And a signed Where the Wild Things Are is the year’s most expensive. A video on it here. Are women underrepresented in poetry criticism? Sina Queyras, Elisa Gabbert, Shanna Compton, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, and Danielle Pafunda tackle the question. “In 1840, the skull of Sir Thomas Browne was removed from the St. Peter Mancroft church, where it had reposed since 1682.” Alexander Nazaryan on the life of the polymath. Where writers are rock stars: author David Mitchell is mobbed in Shanghai. What fun, fearless female will be the voice of the Sex and the Single Girl audiobook? “The true distinction, however, is not between novels and poems, but between poems and storytelling. The novel is a specific but not fixed form of storytelling, in the same way as the romantic lyric, or the sonnet, is a form of poetry.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 22, 2012 On the Shelf My Little Pony, Typography Humor By Sadie Stein “What did the horse say to Bordeaux?” Typographic humor. Bravery, boldness, folly: six insane acts of writing. (Some more literally so than others.) “I took little snippets of text and ideas from some of my favorite authors, and let the words be a springboard for an illustration. The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.” “Twilight’s libraries are profoundly disorganized.” A human librarian gives a professional critique to Ponyville’s My Little Pony librarian, Twilight Sparkle. Nothing you didn’t already know: books can indeed treat depression and anxiety. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 21, 2012 On the Shelf Vintage Ads, New Appeals By Sadie Stein Book sculptures by Kelly Campbell. “I’d been accustomed to write about the old vanished world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I cannot put it into fiction form.” A 1958 film of E. M. Forster in which the author talks about why he stopped writing novels. We have a soft spot for the READ posters, peopled with unlikely celebrities, found in the children’s room of every eighties library, but these are arguably more attractive! “Obviously, one must not take this article’s title too literally. Nor should it be read as anything more or anything less than purely subjective musings in no particular order.” Fifty Books That Will Make You a Better Writer. “A Masterpiece Has Happened!” (Can a masterpiece happen? We defer to the publishers of Of Mice and Men.) A list of classic book ads. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 20, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Put-downs, Venetian Bookshops By Sadie Stein “It’s a bookshop right on the canal that floods every year, so the eccentric, stray-cat-adopting owner keeps his books in boats, bathtubs and a disused gondola to protect them.” A visit to Venice’s Libreria Acqua Alta. The fifty best literary put-downs. “The original Palatino was based on humanist typefaces from the Italian Renaissance, and was named after sixteenth-century Italian calligraphy master Giambattista Palatino.” A history of the most popular fonts used in design. And Then His Hands Went Below the Table: cheating, lying, and disgrace at the National Scrabble Championships. “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— / Not God but a swastika.” According to FBI Files, Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, may indeed have had Nazi sympathies. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 17, 2012 On the Shelf Bookscapes, Book Gardens By Sadie Stein A literary moonscape by Guy Laramée. More amazing book art: a visit to Quebec’s Garden of Decaying Books. “A hundred and twenty five years ago, Oscar Wilde edited a fashion magazine, his first and only office job. We have yet to learn from the experience.” LARB on Wilde’s day job. For the first four decades of competition, the Olympics awarded official medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music, alongside those for the athletic competitions. If you’re in Boston this weekend, enjoy the Dog Day Poetry Marathon, featuring Dorothea Lasky, Jim Behrle, and Eileen Myles (among many others). “As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.” Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, has won the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst in writing. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 16, 2012 On the Shelf Hemingway, Urdu, Doughnuts By Sadie Stein Mediocre spy Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway’s World War II spying career was less than illustrious. In fact, when it came to one ill-fated Cuban operation, Papa was downright bumbling. Meet The Musalman, a handwritten Urdu daily that has been published continuously since 1927 in Chennai, India. “It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents.” Michael Borne on how to weather the agent-finding process. Generation Y (those born between 1979 and 1989) outspent Boomers in books for the first time last year. Check out Electric Literature’s Single Sentence Animations—in which an artist animates a favorite sentence from a writer’s story—here. Dough Country for Old Men (subtitle: “As I Lay Frying”) is a blog that juxtaposes literary quotes against images of doughnuts. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]