Are rereadings better readings? Nabakov thinks so. But Patricia Spacks, in her new memoir On Rereading grapples with the guilty pleasure.
On Rereading
Video Killed the Print Review
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Stuffing This Curiosity Full of Taxidermy
Anjuli Raza Kolb reviews Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, which “tracks the history of whole animal and animal specimen preservation, particularly taxidermy, which refers to the stretching and mounting of the skins of vertebrates, from the seventeenth-century European explorers to the present, with a heavy focus on Victorian practitioners and collectors.” No word on whether or not Poliquin remarks on this curious Danish Facebook group of terrible taxidermy. (Bonus: Caitlin Horrocks’s new story on FiveChapters, “The Lion of Gripsholm – Part Four: IV. The Taxidermist.”)
Why Reread?
Nabokov once claimed "there is no reading, only rereading." In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks pursues the "key to rereading," taking The Waste Land and Mrs. Dalloway as his test cases.
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Salon Culture 2.0
Though Franzen would surely argue (in great excess of 140 characters) to the contrary, the excellent introductory essay from the latest issue of N+1 lauds Twitter for "the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality."
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Untranslated But Not Unloved
Granta highlights their favorite untranslated writers.
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Best of Electric Lit
Here's a look at the top-ten most read articles from Electric Literature of 2015, most of which we've already told you about and all of which is worth a revisit. Bonus: here's a Best of Brain Pickings, as well.