BOMB Magazine has a conversation between poker buddies Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio.
Poker Buddies BOMB
a hectic, unblanced life
D.T. Max's forthcoming David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, has been excerpted in Newsweeek magazine, and you can read it online.
You Come at Nabokov, You Best Not Miss
It is well known that Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson had one of the more visible falling outs in literary history over the former’s English-language Eugene Onegin translation, and indeed the history of that relationship’s souring is fascinating. But even still, it’s extremely interesting to read Nabokov’s nine-page “Reply” to Wilson’s “adverse criticism.” If nothing else, one has to wonder what Wilson was thinking when he brought a knife to a gun fight.
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The Audible Antipodal
Asymptote, a new international journal of literary translation, is up for free online and comes packed with ear candy. Though all the content is translated into English, an audio recording of the authors reading their work in the original language accompanies many of the pieces.
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Getting Graphic
Hyperallergic has excerpts from Rokudenashiko’s graphic memoir What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, which Michael Melgaard recently reviewed at The Millions.
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Holiday links
We've been back from our holiday travels for a few days, and I've finally had some time to catch up with some online reading. Here are some articles and links that caught my eye. (Several of these come from Arts and Letters Daily)From Scientific American, a look at last year's tsunami and how scientists have used this real life event to validate and augment various previously untested theories about these rare, cataclysmic events.The 2005 Dubious Data Awards: the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University highlights several examples of overhyped news stories based on dubious numbers.From Wired: Will the impending bird-flu pandemic be a global version of "the boy who cried wolf?" Scientists are trying to assess the real danger using supercomputers to play out fantastically complicated simulations that remind me of SimCity.In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley "reconsiders" C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower saga. He suggests Beat to Quarters as the best in the series.I've definitely become very interested in the business of newspapers in the last few years. Mike Hughlett's article in the Chicago Tribune is a little "inside baseball," but it lays out how important classified ads are to newspapers, and explains why newspapers aren't as imperiled in the in online classified arena as some might suggest.Another tough business is opening a coffee shop. Michael Idov shares the harrowing details of his experience at Slate.A no-frills list of the bestselling books from 1900 to 1998, year by year.
Goon Squad to the Small Screen?
Well, this is interesting. HBO is looking at turning Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad into a TV series.
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