The Rumpus interviews Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief & most recently Rin Tin Tin) about her obsession with other people’s obsessions.
Susan Orlean’s Obsessions
“Best Speech on the Future of Books & Publishing”
Richard Nash‘s keynote at Booknet Canada: it’s not about “getting published” it’s about “happiness,” which is about “connecting.” Chris Anderson of Wired tweeted, “Best speech on the future of books and publishing I’ve ever seen.”
From the Ground Up
Recommended Reading: Ann Friedman on Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl.
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Bad from Good
Sometimes good writers write very badly. As evidence, Literary Hub has collected samples of bad writing from the likes of Year in Reading alum Isaac Fitzgerald and Daniel Clowes, who we interviewed here.
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People of the Opposite Sex, Am I Right?
The Atlantic has launched a new section — The Sexes — that deals with issues of gender.
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After great Cake – a formal Frosting comes…
We all revere Emily Dickinson‘s poems, but who knew she was also a great baker? Spend your weekend rereading the Dickinson oeuvre, and then top it off by attempting her coconut cake recipe.
False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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Just a Game
Recommended Reading: On playing games and the cult of productivity.
“Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.” – Nabokov
With the movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby slotted to come out next summer and Anna Karenina due out in late November, film critic Richard Brody looks back at some of his favorite movies based on literature and proposes what makes an adaptation successful.
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