Everyone’s been there: the bookstore event at which the reader drones on and on. The Observer shares some reading horror stories (and a few successes). Sarah McNally of NYC’s McNally Jackson bookstore says, “The traditional reading format is broken.”
On the Reading That Drags On and On
What to Believe In
Recommended Reading: Rene Denfeld and Stephanie Feldman on the line between realism and fantasy in their debut novels.
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An Absolute Must Read
David Grann in The New Yorker: "Did Texas execute an innocent man?" This is why long-form journalism matters.
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Joan Didion on Woody Allen
The New York Review of Books posts a vintage essay by Joan Didion on the films of Woody Allen: "This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, 'make an effort' for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s 'relationships'—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents. In fact the paradigm for the action in these recent Woody Allen movies is high school."
The Intellectuals
A look at the writer Nelson Algren, a.k.a. Lewis Brogan in Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.
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The Poetic Seas
“China will establish a naming system for seabed areas based on the country's oldest poetry collection, the country's State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said on Monday.”
A Frothy, Heady BFFship
"It seems that not only do Americans see beer as a person, they see beer as a person other people like better than them."
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