In both pizza and geological terms, the East Coast is known for its thin crust.
On Yesterday’s Earthquake
‘There is no sincerer love than the love of food’ – Shaw
Lapham’s Quarterly has released their Summer 2011 issue. Its topic? Food. They’ve even compiled the issue’s entire bibliography in case you’re interested.
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Best Friends
“Three weeks before she died on July 25, 2012, Marcia (Marty) Brown Stern ’54 sent me a registered letter, which began, ‘What is enclosed may astonish you.’ Indeed it did. The envelope included a draft of ‘marcia,’ an unpublished poem that Sylvia Plath ’55 wrote about their sophomore year together at Smith College in 1951.”
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He Is the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy was one cold dude. Read some of these excerpts from his letters and find your day ruined. Highlights include a critique of a prime minister’s funeral and his excitement at the hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, accused of killing her husband. Here’s a Millions piece on the difficulties of teaching Hardy in 21st-century Florida.
The Dynamism of Duos
Is “the two-person collaboration… the essential creative act”? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he’s written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced – C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even “works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet.” Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
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The End of the Gala Era
Peter Osnos on how far the publishing industry has come since the galas and publishing events of the 1990s: “That the action in publishing now is in the creation of books rather than selling the rights to them is a meaningful indicator of the excitement in the industry about the digital potential.”
Wednesday Links
I’ve been meaning to link to Ed’s review of Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story in the Philly Inquirer. Jenny finds that not everyone agrees with Ed. Previously: King tells the Paris Review the he sees Lisey’s Story as a “special book.”Why Levi won’t be reading Thomas Pynchon’s new book Against the Day. Michael, meanwhile, already has his copy.Former book columnist at the Dallas Morning News Jerome Weeks has started a blog, book/daddy. Weeks took a buyout from his paper and has been vocal about the downsizing of cultural coverage in newspapers. See Weeks’ comment on a recent post on this topic.Assigned reading too hard for schoolkids say experts.Google recently subpoenaed a number of companies – Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and publishers Random House, Holtzbrinck, and HarperCollins – to collect evidence that will back its side in the copyright case against Google Books being brought by authors and publishers. Now, Amazon has rejected Google’s request, and the other companies are expected to follow suit.
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NY Fashion Week and the Working Writer
When high fashion and the life of a working writer combine: on Jessica Francis Kane‘s New York Fashion Week debut.
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