- Hitchens looks back at the Rushdie fatwa and its legacy of censorship.
- The Feltron 2008 Annual Report
- “The Governor and the Glove” – an encounter with Blagojovich
- Joseph O’Neill remembers Updike (via TEV)
- Ted Leo performs Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”
- The Paleolithic era of online news.
- TNR reviews Outliers: “It is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell’s method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.“
Curiosities: The Governor and the Glove
Words & Symbols
Mairead Small Staid writes on the history and poetics of the ampersand, “a logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all.”
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Art Spiegelman on Lynd Ward
At the Paris Review Daily, Art Spiegelman, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, recalls the influence of pioneering graphic novelist Lynd Ward in his introduction to Ward’s Six Novels in Woodcuts.
Coffee House + Emily Books
Coffee House Press recently announced it will be partnering with Emily Books, whose co-founder Emily Gould is a Year in Reading alum, to form their first imprint, which will publish two original titles a year. Their news pairs well with Electric Literature‘s “2015 Indie Press Preview.”
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An Interview with Justin Taylor
Writers who know literature: Bookslut’s Mark Doten talks Kierkegaard, Derrida, Bataille, Sinclair and Faulkner with Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever author Justin Taylor.
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Putin Wins the World Cup
“Putin, like Hitler, understood that the purpose of spectacles is to dazzle the eye while clouding the mind.” For the Daily Beast, staff writer Bill Morris writes about the thuggish dictators who love the propaganda of the World Cup. (If you haven’t already checked out our list of seven great soccer reads, do it now!)
Ahead of His Time
“Adrianne [Lobel] suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are ‘of the same sex, and they love each other,’ she told me. ‘It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.’ In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, [Arnold] Lobel came out to his family as gay.” On love and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
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