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
Book Club Guilt
“denial. A defense mechanism predicated on your inability to accept the painful reality that you are supposed to be reading the selected novel that you literally tried to bury.” At The Toast, Zane Shetler writes a glossary of book club defense mechanisms. Pair with: Our essay on spying on your book club friends.
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The Thousand Autumns of C. Max Magee
A chance to be a part of literary history? David Mitchell fans can now bid in a charity auction to have a character named after them in a future novel of his.
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On “Reading to Impress Yourself”
Rebecca Mead writes for The New Yorker about “The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself” and the false divide between books “we read because we want to and those we read because we have to.”
Strolling Story
Recommended Reading: Lydia Davis’s new short story, “Old Men Around Town,” in the New Statesman. “He stops to tell us that he must be up early in the morning – to get down to the factory. The factory is gone, his men are gone, but he still seems to be in charge of something.” For more Davis, check out her new collection.
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An Illusion To Think So
“We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies.” This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.