December 5, 2012 Bulletin We Have a … Winner? (NSFW-ish) By Sadie Stein The votes are in, the people have spoken, and the winner of the 2012 Bad Sex in Fiction Award is Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, for her novel Infrared. Here is the publisher’s description: Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations. After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects. Read More
December 5, 2012 Correspondence William Styron in Letters, Part 3 By William Styron William and Rose Styron. To Norman Mailer June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Norman: I note that you began your last letter: “I’ve been kind of depressed lately,” and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I’ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me—elated at having just married a most admirable girl (perhaps you’ve gotten an announcement) and depressed because for roughly your own sort of reasons—an inability to get going again at this writing game. To complicate the situation, a few days ago, barreling down the Autostrada in an effort to catch up with Irwin Shaw’s Ford convertible (we had been on a two-car picnic at Angio) I smacked into a motorscooter going full tilt and glued an Italian all over the front end of my car. The guy was made of brick and will survive with nothing more than lacerations, and fortunately for the legal end of the thing it was his own fault (he was a moron, for one thing, and for another had been driving with a glass eye) but such incidents always leave me spookily aware of just how vulnerable we all are. Perhaps they’re valuable as such from an ah-tistic point of view, but I doubt it. Read More
December 5, 2012 On the Shelf Pelican Art, and Other News By Sadie Stein Pelican porn: a celebration of their amazing paperback art. Porn-porn. In libraries. Watch Jeannette Winterson talk about her Lancashire childhood, on location. Meet Small Demons, the literary search engine. The unfinished David Foster Wallace dictionary.
December 4, 2012 Bulletin The Rise and Fall of Dandy By Sadie Stein On December 4, 1937, the first edition of children’s comic book The Dandy was published, also marking the first known use of the speech bubble. Today, the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, marks the final print edition of The Dandy. The speech bubble lives on! [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
December 4, 2012 Arts & Culture Reading the Viaduct By Jessica Vivian Chiu Starting out for the southern end of the Reading Viaduct means walking alongside a live railroad track, vigilant for the sound of a CSX freight train approaching from behind. Your destination is the mouth of an abandoned tunnel, which will pull you into stretches of almost total darkness thirty feet below ground. You aren’t headed for the tunnel because you love tunnels, but to glimpse the diversity of landscapes that makes up Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct before it becomes the city’s answer to New York City’s Highline. You are there for the tunnel as much as for what’s on the other side: the promise of meadowland and prairie hiding in plain sight. The Reading Viaduct may one day become a linear park transecting downtown Philadelphia. Should that happen, the Viaduct would be like no other park in the world. The three-mile stretch runs thirty feet underground at one end and emerges as an elevated line thirty feet above street level on the other. Since the 1980s, it has been abandoned. Sections of the Viaduct may undergo development as early as next year. Read More
December 4, 2012 Look WPA Wants You to Read By Sadie Stein Melville House has a terrific slide show of WPA posters about books and reading. (The Library of Congress has even more!) The art is inspiring enough; the sentiments behind it, even more so. A few of our favorites, below. Read More