Whoever decided to sign Noah Baumbach to adapt Claire Messud‘s The Emperor’s Children for the screen has a good feel for the material (Keira Knightley and Eric Bana are also attached). One kind of has to wonder about Richard Gere, though…the Murray Thwaite role is clearly destined for Brian Cox, or vice versa.
Baumbach to Direct Emperor’s Children
Grant Snider’s muse-inspiring cartoons
The work of literary cartoonist Grant Snider has been featured in such places as the New York Times and Electric Literature (part 2, part 3). We also love this comic on poetry. But don’t wait for the curators to endorse your dose of comic cheer–every one of these pieces can be seen on Snider’s Tumblr page.
New Contest from Kirkus Reviews
To celebrate the 80th birthday of Kirkus Reviews, the editorial staff is holding a contest in which the grand prize winner gets a literary tour of New York City. This includes “two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.”
●
●
Even If You Lose, You Win
The deadline for BOMB‘s poetry contest — judged by Leaving the Atocha Station author Ben Lerner! — is April 16th. The $20 submission fee should be pretty palatable to everyone because it comes with a subscription to the magazine.
●
●
“Bleeding beautiful streams”
“It’s easy to attribute genius to a dead man, a legendary philanderer, liar and self-mythologizer who died beautiful and curly-haired. But ‘What About This’ is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.” On Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems.
Libraries: Future and Present
“Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information. Asking about the future of libraries is another way of asking where this big, hot mess of information is taking us.” Justin Wadland reviews three books on libraries and attempts to predict the future of these institutions in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University has just opened and its library has no books at all.
●
●
Bodleian Treasures
A first edition of Don Quixote, fragments of Sappho, and a lock of Percy Shelley‘s hair all in one place: Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.
●
●
The Latest on Google Books
The Google Books settlement has yet to be settled. The next hearing is September 15th.
●
●