June 24, 2013 On the Shelf Fake Blake, Back Covers, and Other News By Sadie Stein So what’s with all the women’s backs on book covers? “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet,” said John Quincy Adams. Judge for yourself. A school librarian has discovered that a poem called “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room”—attributed to Blake and included on many a school reading list—was in fact written in the United States in the 1980s. Following some extremely (and legally) questionable advice on “getting awesome with women,” Kickstarter has banned all seduction guides. This week’s Bookriot Sunday Diversion—guessing a book title based on its Library of Congress catalog subjects—is, in our humble opinion, nearly impossible.
June 21, 2013 Look Drawing Gitmo By Molly Crabapple In the eleven years since captives arrived at Guantanamo Bay, only three artists have been allowed to visit. I’m here drawing the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hearings for VICE magazine. Artists sketch through three layers of soundproof glass. There’s a monitor for sound, but it runs on a forty-second delay. The delay is to allow for any classified information to be cut. The world in front of you does not sync with the censored world on the screen. We sit far from the accused. Our opera glasses were confiscated as “prohibited ocular amplification.” Before we take drawings into the outside world, a court security officer must approve and sticker them. Read More
June 21, 2013 Quote Unquote Tricks of the Trade By Sadie Stein “Generally one would like to avoid tricking oneself.” —Ian McEwan, the Art of Fiction No. 173
June 21, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Quaker Meeting, Blue Trout, and the Call of the Wild By Sadie Stein Quaker Meeting in London, c.1723. Why aren’t there more novels about Quaker worship? It’s inherently dramatic, people sitting in silence and waiting for God to speak through them. Dramatic—and really, really funny. For proof look no further than Nicholson Baker’s forthcoming novel, Traveling Sprinkler. The hero, Paul Chowder, spends a lot of time attending Quaker meetings (i.e., church). Most of the rest of the novel he spends trying to teach himself the guitar, write (incredibly dorky) songs, and win back the girlfriend who left him in Baker’s earlier novel The Anthologist. There are lots of reasons to love Traveling Sprinkler: Baker gets sweeter with each new book, and underneath the sweetness lie witty arguments about poetry and song and taste. Among other things, this is the best novel I’ve read about Spotify. It also vividly captures Quaker beliefs and practices at a moment when, as Paul Elie wrote last year in the New York Times, many novelists have trouble writing about religion. —Lorin Stein “Beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked.” So says essayist (and issue 204 contributor) Vivian Gornick of critic and writer Mary McCarthy on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. In a piece drawn from her introduction to a new edition of McCarthy’s 1949 novel, The Oasis, Gornick highlights the book’s biting satire but, more importantly, McCarthy’s fearlessness in barely disguising her characters from their real-life counterparts (mostly her Partisan Review colleagues). As McCarthy stated in her Art of Fiction interview, “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” —Justin Alvarez Read More
June 21, 2013 On the Shelf Anonymous Library Sculptures, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anonymous, bookish sculptures have been popping up at Scottish libraries. “It’s nice to go out with a bang”: Alice Munro may (or may not) retire. This will, predicts The New Republic, result in the sort of tedious furor that accompanies any such statement. Some pediatricians are prescribing books to small children: great! (Lollipops are, presumably, a thing of the past.) Tom Wolfe’s next book, The Kingdom of Speech, is a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide.”
June 20, 2013 Look A Residential Library By Sadie Stein Well, this is fantastic. In 1889, British prime minister William Gladstone decided to make his 32,000-book library available to the public. Further, he envisioned the space (located in Wales) as a sort of scholarly hotel, at which visitors might spend the night and enjoy meals. And you still can! For a very reasonable $75 per night (dinner and breakfast included), you can stay in a lovely room, have access to the entire library, and roam the gorgeous grounds. Via Bookriot.