Nearly 300 previously unpublished love letters written by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera Slonim from 1923 to 1975 will be published next year by Knopf.
Nabokov’s Unpublished Letters
Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
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The Small Press and the Big Prize
McPherson & Co. typically does print runs of just 2,000 books. With the tiny press about to put out Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-nominated Lord of Misrule, Barnes & Noble alone wants 2,000, and the question is how many to print.
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Seeing Van Gogh
“‘What pleases the PUBLIC is always what’s most banal,’ he wrote to his brother in 1883. But nowadays Van Gogh pleases the public enormously. So has he become banal?” Julian Barnes reflects on Van Gogh’s life and work and how our perception of him has changed over time in a London Review of Books podcast. Interested in contemporary art? Check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the Whitney Museum.
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The Fitzgeralds in Comic Form
This is the best comic about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald you’ll read all day, I promise.
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Cather People
For The New Yorker Alex Ross describes the role Nebraska’s prairies played in Willa Cather’s writing, his encounters with Cather people, and how he became one himself. “From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. “
This Land Press
This Land Press, which launched in 2010 as a project to “bring literary journalism to Middle America,” will suspend publication of its magazine this spring, and there are no immediate plans for future publication.
One Last Taste
The last meal is a curious staple of modern executions, not least because it involves, in the words of one death-row inmate, “putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, an essay on the ritual’s history, one that includes mention of famous last meals like terminally ill French President Francois Mitterrand’s final dinner of “Marennes oysters, foie gras, and two ortolan songbirds.”