At The Daily Beast, our own Bill Morris goes to a Borders store closing due to bankruptcy to see what remains once all the good books have been picked clean.
Borders Leftovers
On Better Halves (or Twentieths)
Wondering what it’s like to have twenty different personalities? Kim Noble can tell you — she’s published a memoir on the topic.
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Standing in the Doorway with Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney discusses her hotly anticipated new novel and the books that provided a basis for her observational, haunting prose.
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More on the Ailing Humanities
Adding to the general hand-wringing over the state of the humanities, Lee Siegel contradicts Leon Wieseltier’s lament that fewer college students are majoring in literature by contending that modern literature courses ruin the joy of reading. “For every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few,” he writes, “there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist’s chair.” (You can also read a similar argument from a humanities professor in The New Republic.)
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Your X-Man Mutation: Advanced Reading Abilities
Does stereoblindness caused by amblyopia (“lazy eye”) grant “superpowers” to avid readers? Giovanni Garcia-Fenech’s ophthalmologist seems to think so.
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Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn, Erickson, Sendker, Mockingbird
This week sees the release of Edward St. Aubyn’s final “Patrick Melrose novel,” At Last. A new, omnibus edition of all the novels in the series is also out. Steve Erickson’s new novel These Dreams of You is out, as is The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, a debut effort set in Burma by German novelist Jan-Philipp Sendker. This week also sees the release, on Blu-ray, of the 50th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.
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Remain Ourselves
“Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” The remarkable love letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger are both touching and predictably philosophical. Here’s a jarring, surreal reimagining of three works of Arendt’s over at 3:AM Magazine.