A blogger translates a long Murakami interview about 1Q84 (scroll down for parts I, II, and III). (via)
Murakami on 1Q84
Book and Bed
Who’s ready for a trip to Tokyo? Sadie Stein at The Paris Review breaks the lid on a veritable Shangri-La for book lovers, a quasi-bunkhouse known as Book and Bed. Book and Bed is a bunkhouse-slash-bookstore that doesn’t actually sell books. Instead, they have a number of rather spartan beds built inside row after row of bookshelves. Their noble goal is also a simple one; to offer “an experience shared by everyone at least once: the blissful instant of falling asleep while reading.”
A Witch Hunt Revisited
“If Schiff is right to accuse us of nurturing an unrequited infatuation with what amounts to America’s first tabloid scandal, then she’s done the literary equivalent of force us into a cold shower.” The New Republic reviews Stacy Schiff’s new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692.
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You Wouldn’t Understand
How do American high school cliques get their colorful names? At The Morning News, Michael Erard investigates.
It’s a Mystery
There are many possible answers to the question “where do you write?”, but one of the strangest, and most unexpected, has to be “I don’t know.” At The Rumpus, Brendan Constantine admits that he doesn’t write in any one place, and that his memory for where he’s written before is “completely unreliable.” We surveyed our own staff a couple years ago to see how they answered the question.
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“Instead of Sobbing, You Write Sentences”
“Most of the time I think of the self as a snare, and I don’t like being trapped in it. I try to reach out beyond my pittance of experience and connect to the world, but it turns out one way to do that is to be honest and accurate about my own life.” Leslie Jamison interviews Charles D’Ambrosio for The New Yorker. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s review of D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.