In this piece on “Southern Enlightenment“, Kevin Charles Redmon checks out John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s Pulphead and Frank Bill‘s Crimes in Southern Indiana for The Rumpus. In the process, he touches on Axl Rose and methamphetamines.
Guns N’ Roses N’ Meth
The Best Books in Translation
Open Letter Books director Chad Post teamed up with Green Apple Books buyer Stephen Sparks to make a list of their twenty favorite books in translation. Among their selections is László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which Adam Levy reviewed for us last year, and which Post and Sparks describe as “a diabolical, haunting deconstruction of apocalyptic messianism.”
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Wharton is the Original Gossip Girl
On this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Rebecca Mead recommends (seriously) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — “the real thing” — for teen-readers who love the Cecily von Ziegesar Gossip Girl series.
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Type In Your Own Handwriting
Galley Cat links to an online program that allows you to turn your handwriting into a computer font – so you can literally type in your own handwriting.
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A Reader’s Manifesto
This week in book-related comics: “A Reader’s Manifesto” by Grant Snider, via Electric Literature.
Bring Up the Dianas
“I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not?” Hilary Mantel considers the royal family.
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The Signature Smirk of the Absurd
This essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Kurt Vonnegut‘s “strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality” is certainly worth a read.
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Word Games
In an effort to adjust more comfortably to the modern age, the Merriam-Webster company is revamping its iconic dictionary, the first to focus mainly on American English. At Slate, Stefan Fatsis considers the changes, which raise the question of what a modern dictionary should look like. Related: our own Bill Morris on the American Heritage Dictionary.
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