April 24, 2012 On the Shelf World Book Night, Shakespeare Day By Sadie Stein Happy birthday, Shakespeare! Talk to us about cities. Are writers exploited? The seventeenth annual Los Angeles Festival of Books took place last weekend. Check out the fantastic lineup. A roundup of women’s travel diaries through the ages. Busloads of librarians and book-vending dogs! How did you celebrate World Book Night?
April 23, 2012 On the Shelf Corrections and Test Questions: Happy Monday By Sadie Stein He counted both Einstein and Hitler as fans. Rediscovering Karl May. “We were breaking down Dad’s library.” What Lena Dunham is reading. What Olivia Newton-John is reading. What, exactly, is YA? A passage given to New York’s eighth graders on a standardized reading exam is either a masterpiece of postmodernism or completely incoherent. A brief history of the New Yorker’s notable corrections.
April 19, 2012 On the Shelf Horsemaning, Mars, and a Tiny Book By Sadie Stein Descendants of Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien team up on a series of audio fantasy books aimed at young readers. The books, by (J.R.R.’s grandson) Michael Tolkien, will be recorded by Dickens’s great-great grandson, Gerald. A miniature book of fairy tales created for Queen Mary’s dollhouse in 1922 will be reproduced, human-scale. Help a D.C. school fill its library. Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, discusses her book Life on Mars. Typeface obsessive? These temporary tattoos are for you. Brontë sisters action figures. (Via NYDN) The Enid Blyton diet. If you google about the author, Thomas Friedman’s bio appears. Here’s why. Planking is so last year. Meet the revival of horsemaning.
April 18, 2012 On the Shelf Sylvia Plath, Robot Librarians, and Lickable Wallpaper By Sadie Stein How to write a best seller? “If you are like me, you must always have something to read in the bathroom. Anything will do.” Meet identical-twin writers. Amazon to reissue James Bond. “Is it taboo to write about baking and Sylvia Plath?” Paper and Salt proves that whatever else, the results can be delicious. In a Roald Dahl image come to life, meet the world’s first lickable wallpaper. Building a library of jokes, hoaxes, and literary frauds. Libraries jump through hoops (and hire book robots) to stay alive. Dwight MacDonald and the art of the essay.
April 17, 2012 On the Shelf Pulitzers, Saints, and Camera Obscura! By Sadie Stein Pulitzer winners are announced. For the first time since 1977, fiction is snubbed. HuffPo wins its first in its seven-year history. Speaking of winners, Matilda sweeps the Oliviers. Picador’s list of Lit Deep Cuts is actually a pretty good workday sound track! The British Library has acquired St. Cuthbert’s Gospel, the oldest known complete European book, discovered more than nine hundred years ago in a saint’s coffin. Seventy-seven years of (amazing) Romanian comics. Rupert Murdoch versus Harry Evans: The Movie. Today’s question: Wharton or Girls?
April 16, 2012 On the Shelf Rejections, Slush, and Turkeys: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein Dora Saint, the (wonderfully named) author of the bucolic “Miss Read” novels, has died at age ninety-eight. Trouble in Riverdale: the New York Times details the battle for Archie’s soul. Unless you want it doused in liquor, don’t have F. Scott Fitzgerald cook your turkey. In light of Günter Grass’s recent clash with Israel, Dave Eggers is declining to travel to Germany and accept an award from the Günter Grass foundation. Not in protest of the author’s poem “What Must Be Said” but, rather, because “in light of the recent debate, he would be forced into commenting, endlessly and needlessly, on Grass and Israel and Iran, when the purpose of his visit was supposed to be about discussing his book Zeitoun, and the plight of Americans during and after Hurricane Katrina,” according to the Wylie Agency. This is controversial. If you want to get the writer’s experience, try the rejection generator. From the other side of the desk? Get a taste of what editors receive in unsolicited slush piles. The eternal question: Kool Keith or James Joyce?