Jonathan Lethem gives The Guardian a tour of his Brooklyn neighborhood.
Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn
Beautiful Banned Books
This is cool: in celebration of last week’s Banned Books Week, Chapel Hill Public Library held a competition for local artists to create new work based on books that have been banned or challenged. Trading cards were printed from the winning selections, which you can see along with a gallery of all the entries.
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5000 Books Thrown Out in OWS Raid
More than 5,000 books in the Occupy Wall Street library were reportedly thrown away when police moved in to remove protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York early Tuesday. A judge has signed an order allowing protesters to return to Zuccotti Park with their belongings; further court action is expected Tuesday. What that means for the books, no one yet knows.
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How to be a Good Literary Loser
Rick Gekoski, previously shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley prize, talks about what it means to be a good literary loser, at Guardian: “And as soon as the winner is announced and it isn’t you,” Colm Tóibín observed, “the cameraman just walks away, and you are left there at the table trying to look composed, and you want to die.”
Tidy Little Man
To date, Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie, is the only fictional character to get his own obit in the Times. At the LARB, Rumblr editor Molly McArdle looks back on Poirot, the very long-running TV series that ended on November 13th. (h/t The Rumpus)
Opiates
“The cause of death/was living/the immediate cause/of death was/living in Moscow.” At n +1’s website, Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich excerpt their translations of the Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov.
Fantasies of Desires
“(The Great Gatsby) is often considered the greatest American novel of the 20th century—I waver on that sometimes but I love the beauty of its writing, its tabloid immediacy, the high body count, its modernistic touches, the relentless drama put into its novella-length form.” Bret Easton Ellis’s top ten favorite books doesn’t include many surprises, but it’s worth a look.
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