Emily Gould champions Barbara Comyns‘s overlooked novels at The Awl. One more deserving mention: Comyns’s haunting Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.
“The reader emerges … refreshed but crippled”
Lolita Grows Up
Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita has gone through many cover transformations over the years. Did you know this one was supposed to be sideways?
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Baby It’s Warm Outside
“It turned out that the most successful Christmas records tended to have two common qualities: catchy, upbeat melodies and imagined unlikely scenarios for anthropomorphized yuletide characters.” Move over, Frosty! It’s beginning to look a lot like … an unseasonably warm December. Here is a brief history of Christmas songs and of their often-surprising rise from corny kitsch to global sensation.
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Not So Super Journalists
Spider-Man is one of our favorite superheroes, but he’s a terrible journalist. At The Atlantic, Daniel D. Snyder discusses how Peter Parker and Clark Kent are unethical reporters. “The media is, in theory at least, supposed to be honest. Putting on a costume, coming up with a fake name, and lying to everyone about what you really do are the opposite of that.”
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Life as an Afición
Ernest Hemingway was a great drinking buddy as long as you didn’t make any plans with him. At The Moth, author A.E. Hotchner recounts when Hemingway convinced him to be a matador for the day.
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Translators Deserve More Accolades
Daniel Hahn reminds us that translators are vastly under appreciated. To help combat this, he created the TA First Translation prize, an award that will go to a translator for a book’s English-language debut. “There are many prizes in the book world, perhaps too many. But some exist not merely to reward one individual per year, but also to make a statement about what should be valued, and what we need more of. “
Thanks, Amigo
In his upcoming book Borrowed Words, Philip Durkin looked at the languages that have shaped English over the centuries, charting the influence of Spanish, Italian, French and more. At Slate, he sums up his most important data with the help of an interactive tool.
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They Weren’t All Grimm’s
You might say the discovery of 500 lost German fairy tales is, in and of itself, a type of fairy tale.
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“The heat of autumn / is different from the heat of summer.”
With the help of Flora Coker, the Poetry Foundation created an animated reading of Jane Hirshfield’s “The Heat of Autumn.”
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“Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead” is a favorite of mine. I am very happy to see that people will get a chance to read it. It is a really strange and wonderful book.
It is, indeed, a strange book. I recently finished reading it, but I’m not sure what I think of it. It was worth the time, but I don’t think it will stay with me, and I don’t feel any compulsion to read anything else by her. Perhaps with time.