East Coasters can prepare for Hurricane Irene by reading Hart Crane‘s “O Carib Isle” (via W.W. Norton & Co.) or William Carlos Williams‘ “The Hurricane” (via Proustitute). The Book Bench has also compiled a list of “Six Shorts to Read During a Hurricane.”
Hurricane Reads
Getting You Back on Your Feet
If you get bored on your daily commute, you might want to look at Derive, an app that generates random routes that give you new perspectives on your city. As The Common founder (and Millions contributor) Jennifer Acker puts it: “Let the French show you how to walk.”
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Certain Loyalties
In his novels and plays, Sebastian Barry often focuses on segment of Irish society that tends to get ignored in literature — the Irishmen who fought for the British Empire in the first and second World Wars. At Full-Stop, John Cussen reads The Temporary Gentleman, which portrays a British officer, Jack McNulty, who sets out to write his memoirs. (Related: Matt Kavanagh wrote a piece for The Millions on Irish financial fiction after the crash of 2008.)
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Ask Ayn (Rand)
“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
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Sarah M. Broom’s New Orleans
In her debut memoir, The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom writes vividly of her childhood in New Orleans East and charts the city's drastic changes over the decades.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Vargas Llosa, Johnson, Hustvedt, Flynn, Cul de Sac
New this week are Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse by Denis Johnson, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Team Cul de Sac, a book done in tribute to the great comic done by Richard Thompson and to raise money for research into Parkinson’s, which Thompson was diagnosed with in 2009.
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Book-Related Internet Graphics
Today in book-related graphics: The Arts Shelf has created an infographic measuring famous literature by word count, and The New York Times provides a handy, illustrated guide to any writers’ retreat, complete with authors’ cloisters and an “emergency idea generator.”
Brooklyn Boys I
His new novel, Sunset Park, finds Paul Auster leaving behind the metafictional gamesmanship of his recent work for a look at our new Age of Austerity. This week, he talks to The L Magazine about the neighborhood from which it takes its title and inspiration…
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