At The Washington Post, Craig Fehrman points out that FSG inadvertently broke its own embargo on Jimmy Carter’s White House Diary when a preview of the book showed up on Google Books.
Google Books: Embargo Breaker
Da Firenze
At Ploughshares, take a journey through Florence with Emily Smith (and Dante).
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How to Be
If you were never satisfied with Hamlet’s answer to the famous “to be or not to be?” question, now is your chance to change it. Ryan North rewrote Hamlet as a choose-your-own-adventure book, To Be or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or King Hamlet and choose from more than 110 alternate deaths. Brain Pickings got a first look at some of the book’s excellent illustrations.
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O flower of warriors, beware of that trap. Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part, eternal rewards.
Listen to Seamus Heaney read his translation of Beowulf on the BBC’s website. For what it’s worth, Heaney’s version gets my vote as the best one out there. Consider this passage for some Wednesday inspiration.
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The Weight of Each Other’s History
Recommended Reading: On Audre Lorde’s archive in Berlin.
An Objective Look at Seven M.F.A. Rejections
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, an objective look at seven M.F.A. program rejections compared to other historic rejections.
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Bayside High as Playboy Mansion
Parental Guidance Suggested: The 11 Most Scandalous Revelations from Dustin Diamond’s tell-all Saved By The Bell memoir. (I feel kind of ashamed of myself for even posting this, but such is life on the Internet.)
These narrators are conspicuously powerless
Over at Prospect, Leo Benedictus takes a look into the subversive “hindered narrators” in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Room, and Pigeon English.
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