Happy Halloween! At the New Yorker, the winners of the dress your pet as a literary character contest. Don’t miss the honorable mentions (I’m partial to the feline Moby Dick).
Critterati
Milord, Milady
“Is this the right time to say ‘Zounds, milady’?” A short history of Renaissance Faires.
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Toni Morrison in Her Own Words
A new documentary pays tribute to Toni Morrison's illustrious, inspiring career and gives the author a chance to reflect on her decades of writing.
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Curiosities: Seekers, Idiots, Grazers, Browsers, Campers, Independents, Time-Sucks
Lots of action with the online mags: There’s a new issue of The Hipster Book Club, with a review of Aleksander Hemon’s Love and Other Obstacles, and an interview with Glen David Gold. There’s a new Quarterly Conversation, which includes Scott Esposito’s thoughtful consideration of Cormac McCarthy. Issue 3 of N1BR is out. And the first issue of The Point includes a piece on David Foster Wallace’s legacy.Brooklyn gets a new bookstore: Greenlight!Corpus Librus, the BEA editionIn an interview with Ed Champion, Sherman Alexie clarifies his comments about the Kindle being elitist.Tibor Fischer shares a first look at Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming Inherent Vice.The seven types of bookstore customers. (via)An incredible collection of pocket paperback colophons.Coming soon from The Onion, Inventory, a collection of “obsessively specific pop-culture lists.”The Ask Metafilter crowd suggests what to read after 2666.For fans of style guides, here’s one from The EconomistFOUND Magazine founder Davy Rothbart is crazy about vintage NBA jerseys. (via)Further Reading: Edan’s post on gifting books in a digital age generated a bunch of interesting comments. Be sure to check them out. On a related note, in PopMatters, Michael Antman bemoans the disappearance of the “physical manifestations of contemporary culture.”
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Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
On Writing and “Built-in” Editing
Sergio De La Pava, the once and future king of our list of top ten books, gets the interview treatment at The Believer’s Logger page. Now might be a good time to scroll back to our profile of the author, whose first book, A Naked Singularity, came out in bookstores in June.
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Waxwing Debuts
Waxwing, a new literary journal, has published its first issue online. The journal’s editors state that their mission is “to include American writers from all cultural identities — in terms of race, ethnicity, indigenous tribe, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, ability, language, religion, and region — alongside international voices, published bilingually.”
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