Evidently, Alain de Botton has recovered from the unfavorable New York Times review of his latest book, The Pleasures of Sorrow and Work, for which he excoriated reviewer Caleb Crain, claiming that Crain “killed [his] book in the United States.” De Botton was just named Heathrow Airport’s first writer-in-residence. During his week tenure at a desk in Terminal 5, he will record his observations in “real time,” with his typing appearing on a screen behind him. Afterward, the entries will be collected and published as a book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary.
Writing for Airports
Curiosities: the Department of Dead Horses
Tranquility by Attila Bartis is named winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award. Scott rounds up some reviews and background on the book.Video: Tom Perrotta on the state of American literary culture."Art History books are full of errors." This one is about La Raie Vert [the Green Stripe] from 1905 by Henri Matisse.Perfect for the cubicle: Five Chapters serialized John Cheever's short story, "Of Love: A Testimony," in bite-sized portions.Mark Sarvas (re)launches the Three-Minute-Interview series, starting with Plimpton Prize winner Jesse Ball. We reviewed Ball's debut Samedi the Deafness last year. Ball's new book is The Way Through Doors.Meanwhile, Sheila Heti chats up Mary Gaitskill.Yearbook photos of politicians: Mike Huckabee, How YOU doin'?Norman Mailer and William Styron conduct an epistolary friendship.The Nation revisits the ever-popular subject of Kafka and his critics.Wyatt Mason and friends parse Joseph O'Neill to within an inch of his life.Reif Larsen is this year's Million Dollar Baby.And, from the Department of Dead Horses and Guys Kicked While Down, we bring you this...
●
●
●
Is Your Dog’s Smile Really a “Smile?”
Adorable pictures of baby hippos aside, it’s a common misconception that animals are “smiling” at you out of sincere happiness. Probably you’re projecting that onto them, writes Lee Dye in a piece from 2010. For more on the perils of assigning human qualities to other animal species, I highly recommend checking out Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep.
●
●
Dead Pig Collectibles
Warren Ellis’s Dead Pig Collector was released this week as a Kindle Single, and with it came a whole heap of extras. To wit: there’s an online excerpt, an author interview, another piece of fiction, and also an accompanying music playlist created by the author. (In that interview, he remarks that his next novel will be based on this talk he gave two years ago.)
●
●
It’s not plagiarism… it’s angloglobalisation?
On the London Review of Books blog, Kaya Genç makes the case that the similarities between the successful Turkish author Elif Şafak's work and Zadie Smith's books is a fact of Turkey's shifting cultural values rather than plagiarism: "Istanbul, the city Shafak returned to after writing her book in London and the setting for many of her earlier novels, resembles London more and more." For a bit of context, here's Lydia Kiesling's rundown of the initial scandal.
●
●
The Escape of North Korea’s Poet Laureate
For years, Jang Jin Sung traveled within Kim Jong-il’s inner circle. As North Korea’s official poet laureate, he was tasked with “writing epic poems for [the] dictator … and overseeing inter-Korean espionage.” But in 2004, fearing a charge of treason, Sung fled the country, becoming one of the nation’s most high-profile defectors. Recently, Sung – who just published his memoir – spoke with Maclean's about his life, his escape, and literature.
●
●
Cher and Cher Alike
Speaking like Shakespeare
"What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare?" A father and son team are working to answer this question, recover Shakespeare's original pronunciation and perform his plays in the new-old style, and lest this sound like a silly exercise in scholarship consider that "two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets.... have rhymes that only work in [Old Pronunciation]."
●
●