July 30, 2012 On the Shelf Writerly Recipes, Great Closers By Sadie Stein Vintage book art. The strange case of the Aleppo Codex. Eat like your favorite writers. (Maybe not Fitzgerald. Or Ginsberg.) The Boston of Infinite Jest. The ten best closing lines in literature. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 27, 2012 On the Shelf Kubrick, Steinbeck, and Stine, Oh My! By Sadie Stein Welcome to the National Steinbeck Center, the largest museum dedicated to an American author. Happy birthday, Stanley Kubrick. Here is a letter he wrote to Arthur C. Clarke. Happy birthday, Goosebumps. Watch the trailer for the adaptation of David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas. “Writers privately love two things: obsessing over rejection and watching their peers fail.” On blogging about rejection letters. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 26, 2012 On the Shelf Helpmeets, Field Guides, Burning Questions By Sadie Stein “Few couples have had as complicated and even posthumous a relationship as Friderike Burger and Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who was and continues to be one of the most widely translated German-language authors in the world.” The eternal question, really: What would happen if fonts were superheroes? The other eternal question: What would happen if great authors were Olympics commentators? Vote for the best YA novel ever written. A field guide to the American blurb. An endangered species? The Man Booker long list is announced. Oh no! Citing rising operating costs, the Bowery Poetry Club joins the list of closing literary landmarks. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 25, 2012 On the Shelf Rare Books, Sharks, and Ink By Sadie Stein Terrible beach reads. At UVA, rare-book school is in session. Journalist (and former Paris Review editor) Philip Gourevitch on editing, writing, and his work on genocide. Famous writers and their tattoos. Sergei Dovlatov featured on Russian radio. (In translation!) The sad fate of Dawn Powell’s journals.
July 23, 2012 On the Shelf Create Your Own Genie; Listen to Beckett By Sadie Stein The Cygnus Ensemble is presenting three original musical pieces to accompany Samuel Beckett plays. “Omitting letters can confuse. How is the poor reader expected to differentiate between b******* and b*******?” Jonathan Swift and the question of truth. “E-books appear to be doing for religious books what they did for erotica.” Happy (belated) birthday to scholar, teacher, and Norton Anthology founder M. H. Abrams. Create your own genie to win a bookstore gift certificate. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 20, 2012 On the Shelf Book Mazes, Ugly Covers, Hauntings By Sadie Stein Brazilian artists Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo have made a maze out of books. Beautiful books, ugly covers. Sure, e-books are huge, but are they heirlooms? Regardless, Penguin has acquired self-publishing platform Author Solutions. And the British government is looking into the whole public-library-e-book-lending situation. In other news, a haunted bookstore? [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]