The Infinite Summer online book club, brain child of Matthew Baldwin, has finally completed Infinite Jest. To celebrate, they are reading Dracula. Steven Lowman briefly interviews Baldwin at the Washington Post blog Short Stack.
Infinite Summer: Reading D.F.W. in Concert
RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing passed away last night at the age of 94. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child and The Golden Notebook took home the Nobel in 2007 for "subjecting a divided civilisation to scrutiny," in the words of the prize committee.
Weltsday
Here's a Rob MacDonald poem about a spelling bee contestant struggling with the word weltschmerz to get you through your Wednesday.
Five Symptoms
Recommended Reading: Maddox Pratt on battling depression and writing a long work of hypertext literature.
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Supply and Demand
A London book dealer declares "The Great Book Glut of 2010."
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“Cool Characters”
"What those who care about books must appreciate is that the boundaries between canonical and noncanonical have never been ironclad in African-American literature." Clark C. Cooke writes for the LA Review of Books on black crime fiction and the rise of a "new African-American literary scene."
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The (Literary) Gen-X Midlife Crisis
At the Daily Beast, Taylor Antrim analyzes Bret Easton Ellis, Jennifer Egan and the Gen-X midlife crisis: “Sad white guys! The culture’s lousy with them...”