“If DBC Pierre wasn’t twelve scotches into a bender before he went on stage, I have lost a substantial wager.” Notes from the Melbourne Writers Festival, at the Electric Literature blog.
Notes from the Melbourne Writers Festival
iStephen Fry
Stephen Fry joins "the congregation at the Church of Apple" for the launch of the iPad and shares his thoughts on the company and its newest product.
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Defense Against Detractors
Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield's Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
Tangled Youths
Evan Hughes investigates the formulation of such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. He claims they and their generation "had youths tangled enough for ten novels."
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Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace; Libaire; Emmich; Solwitz; Maum
Out this week: Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace; White Fur by Jardine Libaire; The Reminders by Val Emmich; Once, in Lourdes by Sharon Solwitz; and Touch by Courtney Maum. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Picture Books
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when "picture books" were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole's reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.
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