The latest actor to go vampire? John. C Reilly! As you might expect, he’s a hammy vampire, not a sparkly one. See the preview for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. (The film is based on a series of children’s books by English-born Irish author Darren O’Shaughnessy, who publishes under the name Darren Shan.)
Cirque Du Freak
The Pandora of Books
In The Atlantic, Johnathan A. Knee writes about how curation and aggregation can be more profitable than content creation. That is the idea behind BookLamp, a new search engine based on books' content and writing style, not sales data. “At times, being able to ignore the marketing data can be good for the recommendation,” explains CEO Aaron Stanton.
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Don’t Read This When Hungry
Recommended Reading: Kevin Brockmeier's essay "Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place" at The Georgia Review. "Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work." For more Brockmeier, check out our review of his novel The Illumination.
Runways for Days
"I took my son to Paris fashion week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants." Michael Chabon writes a beautiful piece for GQ about going couturing with his son, Abraham. Pair with yesterday's essay by R. J. Hernández on fashion in literary fiction.
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Even the Editors Get Rejected
Perhaps someone should compile a Salon des Refusés of Poetry Magazine's rejected poets.
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Encyclopedic Knowledge
A transcript of Jorge Luis Borges’s conversation with Argentinian poet Osvaldo Ferrari about the power and pleasure of academic knowledge appears in English for the first time. As Borges explains it, "I think that the encyclopedia, for a leisurely, curious man, is the most pleasing of literary genres."
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Retreat with Eliot
Looking for a New England writer's retreat? Perhaps you could stay in T. S. Eliot's childhood summer home.