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
e-reading Thomas Pynchon
After years of resistance, Thomas Pynchon is only now allowing for his work to be sold as ebooks.
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The Spy Who Wrote a Memoir
The Guardian has a beautiful multimedia feature in celebration of John le Carré's new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, including an exclusive excerpt, original notes from the author's archives, and readings of his novels by Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Damien Lewis et al. Read also: our own Emily St. John Mandel on using le Carré for literary cover.
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The Curse of the Diaeresis
Okay, so the deal with the famed and occasionally disdained New Yorker umlaut on words like "cooperate" is that it is not an umlaut, it is a diaeresis, and they'll be holding onto it, thank you very much.
Love – Love
"When the French would go to serve, they often said, Tenez!, the French word for 'take it,' meaning 'coming at you, heads up.' We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game 'ten-ez' by association. A lovely detail in that it suggests a scene, a Florentine ear at the fence or entryway, listening." Whether it's David Foster Wallace or John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about tennis, I'm reading it. Another three-namer, Jonathan Russell Clark, reviewed The David Foster Wallace Reader for The Millions.
The Water: Stay Out of It
Shark Week 2013 isn’t for another ten months, but you can satisfy your hunger for tales of nautical catastrophe and man-eating fish with these two databases: WreckSite, a collection of shipwrecks classified by worldwide positions, and The International Shark Attack File, a compilation of “all known shark attacks.”
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The Problem with the Poky Little Puppy
"The problem is that young children have terrible taste and enjoy garbage. Another problem, which compounds the first problem, is that they want to hear the same books hundreds of times in a row. So for all the joys that storytime can offer, it frequently entails a kind of dismal self-abnegation that’s too excruciating even to describe as tedium—an actively painful sense of my precious time on earth being torn from my chest and tossed into a furnace." Gabriel Roth writes about the terrible Poky Little Puppy for Slate, and his complaints pair well with Jacob Lambert's Millions series, "Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?" and "Again, I Ask..."
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The Lives of Movie Characters
“Writing about film applies pressure to how ekphrastic writing can be possible, let alone evocative–and further, highlights questions that pertain to all kinds of writing, from honing poetic imagery to composing entire fictive worlds: how can writing engage or transform the fidelity of its subject(s)? How do you write about something so simultaneously ephemeral and fabricated, and yet intuitively, enduringly ‘real’?” For Ploughshares, Veronica Fitzpatrick on writing about film. Pair with this Millions piece on literary magazines in film and TV.
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Nice Wrinkles, Beckett
Portraits of authors composed of their own words? Why not.
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