October 16, 2013 On the Shelf Awards Season Fever! And Other News By Sadie Stein At the Bookers, twenty-eight-year-old Eleanor Catton won the fiction prize for the hefty, historical The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever recipient. Meanwhile, stateside, the National Book Awards have listed their finalists. Bookish NYC gentlemen! There are still a few tickets available for Housing Works’s I Like Your Glasses: Literary Speed Dating, hosted, naturally, by CoverSpy. Ronan Farrow, activist, scholar, and son of Mia Farrow and someone else famous, is writing a book on military history. Pandora’s Box: How American Military Aid Creates America’s Enemies will be released in 2015 by Penguin.
October 15, 2013 First Person Depths By Geoff Bendeck Just beyond the Sarah Lawrence Library there is a patch of earth where young children play. They bounce into each other, ricocheting off in all directions, exploring their new world, digging into the ground incessantly with plastic buckets, scoops, and rakes. I wonder if they are aware of what they are doing. We are constantly sifting through the dust of the past. Annie Dillard said, “We arise from dirt and we dwindle to dirt and the might of the world is arrayed against us.” A little boy, his hair a cropped mohawk, wipes his muddy hands on a bright orange shirt. Next to him a little blond girl rakes calmly at the giant mound of earth he excavated. Then without warning they toss down their tools and are off chasing something out of view. A new boy and girl move in and take their place, digging. When I was a child my father told me a story about growing up in Trujillo, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. The story was about the day he lost his sneakers gambling marbles with the Garifuna Indians, who lived in thatch huts right on the beach. Read More
October 15, 2013 Quote Unquote Carry On, Jeeves By Sadie Stein “I don’t know why spats went out! The actual name was spatterdashers, and you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter dashing you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully comfortable, especially when you wore them in cold weather. I’ve written articles, which were rather funny, about how I used to go about London. I would borrow my brother’s frock coat and my uncle’s hat, but my spats were always new and impeccable. The butler would open the door and take in my old topcoat and hat and sniff as if to say, ‘Hardly the sort of thing we are accustomed to.’ And then he would look down at the spats and everything would be all right. It’s a shame when things like spats go out.” —P. G. Wodehouse, the Art of Fiction No. 60
October 15, 2013 Look Author’s Best Friend: The Pets of Literary Greats By Timothy Leo Taranto Pause Play Play Prev | Next Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York, and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
October 15, 2013 On the Shelf Scandal at the Bookers, and Other News By Sadie Stein Behind the scenes at the Booker Prize! The lurid image is not misleading. We are not inclined to argue with the authority of this headline: “Here Is the One Perfect Book for Every Single Myers-Briggs Type.” “Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading.” Neil Gaiman on letting children read what they want. Crowdsourcing Tolstoy. “I don’t know what to make of it really. I’m a bit of an unlikely sex symbol. The mothers have all been coming up to me at the school gates taking the mickey out of me.” The teacher who inspired Helen Fielding’s latest romantic hero.
October 14, 2013 Quote Unquote On Twaddle By Sadie Stein “I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” ―Katherine Mansfield