“Mad scientist of smut” Nicholson Baker gets the New York Times treatment.
“He could easily get seasonal work as a shopping-mall Santa.”
Speaking like Shakespeare
"What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare?" A father and son team are working to answer this question, recover Shakespeare's original pronunciation and perform his plays in the new-old style, and lest this sound like a silly exercise in scholarship consider that "two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets.... have rhymes that only work in [Old Pronunciation]."
Brooklyn Boys II
...meanwhile, quondam neighbor Jonathan Lethem has packed up for California (to take over the Pomona College position last held by David Foster Wallace). Just in time for Halloween, he raps with New York Magazine about the move...and about his new, book-length treatment of John Carpenter's They Live.
The Traumas We Carry
“If I’d stayed, I could have protected him. That’s what I believed. Maybe he believed that, too.” Over at Catapult, Chris J. Rice writes beautifully and harrowingly about finding her long-lost brother after decades.
TLS Best Books of the Year
The Times Literary Supplement offers "Best Books of 2009" picks from a smattering of contributors, including Julian Barnes and Ali Smith.
Peter Carey Point-Counterpoint
Contrasting takes on Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America, from Open Letters Monthly and...er, The Onion.
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Goodbye, Friday Night Lights
It's been one week since the "Friday Night Lights" finale aired on network television, and it seems as though the entire internet is grieving. Two Grantland pieces: an oral history and a tongue-in-cheek analysis; an opinion piece juxtaposing Peter Berg's low-rated drama against "Glee"'s success; and now even The Paris Review has thrown its hat into the ring. All of this, of course, comes on the heels of our own Sonya Chung's piece last April.
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