Congratulations to the NYPL for restoring $36.7 million of the city’s proposed $40 million budget cut. Today also marks the first day of new NYPL president Anthony Marx. (Pro-tip: when you want to skip the wait list for a popular book, reserve the large-print version!)
A Big Week for the NYPL
Trolling with Amanda Palmer
Art is about connecting the dots, Amanda Palmer proposed in her keynote address on creativity and sharing art in the internet age at the 2013 Grub Muse Literary Conference earlier this month. “For every bridge you build together with your community of readers, there’s a new set of trolls who sit underneath it,” she said about the internet.
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87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston
New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be published next week.
Saeed Jones on Creating Change
Poets and Writers sits down with Year in Reading alumnus Saeed Jones to talk writing, publishing, and BuzzFeed. “Creating change is about having a critical mass of several influences, but one is the right people, and creating a space where people feel that they can speak up and have these conversations and experiment.”
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Elif Batuman on Reading the Russians
Essayist and Russian literature scholar Elif Batuman in an interview with the Boston Globe on how the Russians get the combination of “funny and sad” better than the Germans, the English, or the French.
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Your Country Rocks
Few people know that Roger Ebert was an ardent Anglophile, so much so that in 1986 he wrote an obscure little book, The Perfect London Walk, in which the lifelong film critic laid out his preferred walking path through the city. Over at Slate, Katie Engelhart reviews the book, which apparently still functions as a guide to a decent stroll.
Vintage Barthelmismo
Thomas Pynchon defined what he termed “vintage Barthelmismo” as “fictions thoughtfully concocted and comfortably beyond the reach of time.” This moving tribute to Donald Barthelme by Padgett Powell from the forthcoming anthology, A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors, is right in line with Pynchon’s sentiment. Here’s another Barthelme mention from The Millions that you may be interested in.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ferris; Khakpour; Fierro; Hemmings; Mosley; Boyden; Melnik; Ma; Johnston
Year in Reading alum Joshua Ferris has a new book on shelves this week, as does Millions contributor Porochista Khakpour. Also out: Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro; The Possibilities by Kaui Hart Hemmings; Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore by Walter Mosley; The Orenda by Joseph Boyden; Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik; The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma; and Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2014 Book Preview.
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Yeah, good work closing the gap NYPL. Are you going to double the late fees and cut the borrowing period to two weeks or just add a zero to the fake fines that show up on my account?