The fine folks at the Vintage and Anchor Tumblr account have compiled a list of the ten oldest books known to man.
Oldest Books
This is Your Brain on Austen
What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
●
●
Eisenberg Wins the PEN/Faulkner
Deborah Eisenberg has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions.)
●
●
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead
“If you remember the sixties, then you weren’t really there.” We’ve all heard the saying, but in case you actually forgot what the sixties were like, I have good news for you. The complete archive of Oz Magazine, sometimes called the most controversial magazine of the sixties, is available for download over at Open Culture. Oz regularly featured work by such artists as R. Crumb, Germaine Greer, and many more.
●
●
#1000BlackGirlBooks
If you haven’t heard about Marley Dias, you have now. She has launched the #1000BlackGirlBooks book drive to collect one thousand books with black girls as the protagonists, which will be donated to a library in St. Mary, Jamaica. Did I mention that she’s eleven years old?
“A startlingly new interpretation of the Parthenon”
Perhaps inspired by the similarly-named astronomer, Freeman Dyson wrote an entry for the NYT’s By the Book series, in which he praises Edward Wilson, Kristin Ghodsee, Robert Kanigel and Octavia Butler, the last of whom he dubs his favorite novelist of all time. Sample quote: “The Magic City can be read on two levels, as a children’s adventure story and as a critique of modern society. Karl Marx was a friend of [Edith] Nesbit’s family.”
“Hardly Shakesperean at first”
Recommended Reading: Ted Widmer on the miscellaneous writings of Abraham Lincoln.
●
●
The Books That Shaped America
Mark Dimunation was on the committee that selected the 88 books for the Library of Congress’s current “Books That Shaped America” exhibit. Recently he did an interview with NPR‘s Lynn Neary in which he explained how he arrived at his decisions to include such works as Goodnight Moon, The Joy Of Cooking, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
●
●
Literature, Morality, and $25,000
“Morality… is a slippery slope and nowhere more, perhaps, than in regard to art, to literature, which begins as the expression of a single heart, a single mind. That it becomes more than that — connective, the fiber of a conversation between writer and reader, and between both of them and the world — is not just the point but the miracle… To frame this miracle in moral terms is to misread what art extends to us: a way of joining, for a moment only, across the void.” In an article for the LA Times, David L. Ulin considers the implications of the George V. Hunt, SJ Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts and Letters, which will award $25,000 to a writer “of sound moral character and reputation [who] must not have published works that are manifestly atheistically or morally offensive.”
●
●