New Directions turned 75 yesterday, so here’s a look back on the history of their colophon. In other birthday news, Iris Murdoch was born on this day in 1919, and tomorrow The Catcher in the Rye turns 60.
Literary Birthdays
Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”
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In a Room of the Auction House
“It can not be that I monopolize / The making of the songs that give you praise / Or that such pools as are your dearest eyes / Have just one bather through the unclear days. / Then, let me take my place amid the pack, / If I so pack my songs with your rare worth / There were no quality they then should lack / But they were bettered by that happy death.” A previously unpublished Ezra Pound sonnet selling at auction is always newsworthy–especially when it fetches nearly $12,000. Here is a related Millions piece about the difficult poetry of Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and Ted Berrigan.
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David Shields on the Colbert Report
Watch David Shields on the Colbert Report last week — Colbert: “Are you the Vanilla Ice of novels?” Shields: “Precisely.”
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From Honey to War
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Highlighting the Handmaid
“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” BookRiot did us all a service by finding out the 10 most highlighted passages of (the e-book edition of) Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale. You must also read our own Edan Lepucki on reading and re-reading Atwood.
Hitler at Home
Read about Hitler’s vacation homes and how they shaped his image via propaganda in an excerpt from Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos at The New Republic. We reviewed Ben Urwand’s book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which discusses other propaganda surrounding the Nazi regime.
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New McEwan
We recently linked to a new interview with Ian McEwan, whose latest novel The Children Act comes out next week. The LA Times has a full review of the new book, and the piece pairs well with Charles-Adam Foster-Simard‘s review of McEwan’s Sweet Tooth. And of course there’s Atonement, which comes up in a variety of Millions articles, from Michael David Lukas‘s essay on the polyphonic novel to Seth Sawyer‘s recent piece on food and reading.