James Cameron just can’t win with the Reds. Not just the Chinese communists, but the Russians, as well, have taken issue with Avatar‘s politics.
Avatar in Russia
Fahrenheit 32
Say the books in your Encyclopedia Britannica are moldy, unread and obsolete. You know you could burn them or throw them away, but somehow, you can’t do either. Why not?
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Seeking an End to eBook DRM
Joe Wikert explains why the book industry needs to learn from the music industry, drop DRM, and adopt a unified ebook format.
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Beauty Isn’t Logic Isn’t Beauty
Symmetry’s addictive. Beethoven sought it in the order of chords, Einstein in the logic of theory. Countless writers, too, have sought its imprint in the perfect mot juste. In Aeon Magazine, Philip Ball pleads fervently against the pursuit of beauty in logic, and logic in beauty. “There’s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres… the search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Newitz; O’Rourke; Kent; Peery; McDermott
Out this week: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz; Sun in Days by Meghan O’Rourke; The Good People by Hannah Kent; The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs by Janet Peery; and The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Ben Lerner’s Nightstand
Ben Lerner, whose 10:04 has been reviewed in Bookforum and the New York Times, made an appearance on The New Directions blog to recommend four books of poetry that have at one point or another graced his nightstand. (No word on how he winnows down his list of books to be stacked on said nightstand, but our own Sonya Chung can offer advice.)
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After the Dawn
In 1958, the Indian writer Yashpal published the first installment of This Is Not that Dawn, an eleven-hundred-page novel and feminist epic written in Hindi. The book presages many of the biggest controversies affecting India today. At Page-Turner, Karan Mahajan reads the novel, explaining why he believes it to be “the greatest long novel about India.” Related: Mythilo G. Rao pays a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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