- History’s 10 best prison breaks.
- A Paid Content column argues that the true genius of the Kindle is that it breaks the trend toward multi-tasking…
- …But there is still a huge amount of confusion surrounding the Kindle’s DRM policies.
- AbeBooks aggregates some summer reading lists.
- VQR compiles a brief reading list for those following the post-election protests in Iran.
- Bay Area readers: Conversational Reading is taking a page from The Millions playbook and hosting a San Francisco indie bookstore walking tour. Sounds fun!
Curiosities: SF Tour
I Know That Naked Man
Recommended Reading: The untold story of a legendary photograph by Diane Arbus, A naked man being a woman, over at The Literary Hub.
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Typewriter Art
Luddites rejoice! If you still use a manual typewriter, you already know that they’re superior to laptops for writing. Now comes proof that they’re also better at making art than text-based computer art programs like ASCII and its “colored cousin,” ANSI. The video’s narrator tells us, in German, that many of the subjects autographed their typewriter-generated portraits, and the Pope sent a thank you note — and cash!
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“Carefully Arranged Derangement”
“Literature offers a way of framing, or reckoning with, the chaos of a universe we can never truly know.” The LA Times interviewed Denis Johnson about his new novel The Laughing Monsters, an excerpt of which can be read online here.
Instapoetry Month
We’re in the thick of National Poetry Month now, and Tweetspeak has a full round-up of ways to participate online. In particular, I think the Virginia Quarterly Review’s “Instapoem” series is especially rad. (Gee, I wonder why.)
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Across the Screen
“His books are not only obviously produced by an obsessive film buff (as evidenced by one wry recurring trick, the dates in brackets that follow even citations of celluloid ephemera), they often seem to want to be movies, as shown by another signature device, the way his protagonists – from the 1890s European spies and 1950s New Yorkers in the interwoven narratives of his debut, V. in 1963, all the way to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge in 2013 – break anti-naturalistically into song like characters in musicals.” An argument that Thomas Pynchon writes fiction tailor-made for the cinema.
Turn to Page 394
We lost another great one this week in Alan Rickman. He will be remembered forever by fans of the Harry Potter series as the maybe-evil, maybe-heroic professor Severus Snape, but the Potter series wasn’t Rickman’s only brush with the literary. Here are a few recordings of him reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy.
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Jewel Boxes
Colm Tóibín’s new book on Elizabeth Bishop is unusually hard to categorize. Part “primer,” part “personal reflection,” in Jonathan Farmer’s words, it moves back and forth between analysis and lyricism, alternating passages of beauty with nuts-and-bolts guides to Bishop’s poems. In Slate, Farmer tries to nail it down. You could also read our own Michael Bourne’s review of Tóibín’s The Master.
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First Cloud Atlas, Now This
Apparently David Magee, the screenwriter behind the Life of Pi movie, declared the book “unfilmable” before he was asked to adapt it.