“Authors – especially those who wrote with pens instead of those soulless computer things – are prime doodlers.” Check out this gallery of doodles by famous authors, from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka to Henry Miller.
Doodles by Famous Authors
Fantastical Fowl
What’s the deal with all the fake birds animated into fantasy and sci-fi films these days? According to Brian Thill, these digital flocks “aren’t just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real” but are rather signifiers of “our oldest and most common metaphor for freedom.” What to make of their ability to evade disaster or succumb to it, however, is another story entirely.
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And Still I Rise
Via Galleycat we’re watching the just-released trailer for the upcoming documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, which is scheduled to air on October 14th on PBS. Pair with this beautiful in memoriam we published upon her passing in 2014.
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Raising Hell
“When you read these books—I suggest perusing them, martini in hand, while your children (or better your friends’ children, for whom you are babysitting) run around shrieking—you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have.” Dan Kois on Shirley Jackson’s two memoirs on parenting.
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Ontological Studies of Swedish Furniture
Most readers nurse particular fantasies of stepping into their favorite books. Whether they dream of enrolling at Hogwarts, or signing up for MI6 with James Bond, they usually have a stable of settings that function as a means of escape. So imagine how strange and conflicting it was to be Jonathan Gottschall, the English professor who got a chance to enter Fight Club.
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