Nell Casay, editor of The Journals of Spalding Gray, takes readers through the tortured life of the famous actor, playwright, and monologuist.
Spalding Gray’s Secrets
Light Us Up
For whatever reason, the Zippo lighter has earned a place as an icon of Americana, a symbol of everything simple and reliable in the country. At the Ploughshares blog, Nancy McCabein pays a visit to the Zippo Museum, punctuating her account with quotes from works of literature that feature the lighter.
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Pevear and Volokhonsky on Leskov
Granta talks to some translators of Russian literature about what they’re working on, and we learn that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the first couple of Russian translation are working on a 600-page collection of stories by Nikolai Leskov, an underappreciated contemporary of Dostoevsky. Previously: The Millions interviews P&V.
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Lydia Takes the Bronze!
Congratulations to our own Lydia Kiesling whose essay “Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk” has taken third place in the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Arts & Literature as judged by Robert Pinsky.
Very Short Story Contest
Want a chance to win $200 and a shot at glory? Consider entering The Coffin Factory’s “Very Short Story Contest.” The deadline is August 15th.
Typesetting in the Digital Age
From Abu Dhabi’s The National, an interesting piece on the challenges of typesetting and book design on digital platforms: “With the coming of ebooks, this invisible craft must be reinvented if it is not to disappear.”
Scrubbing Facebook
Adrian Chen spoke with a former Facebook employee, and learned “how Facebook censors the dark content it doesn’t want you to see, and the people whose job it is to make sure you don’t.” In short: exploitation of “human content monitors” in the third world.
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