Do you live in one of the world’s ten most literary cities? I don’t.
Then Again, Most American’s Don’t
Edinburgh Fringe Festival Joke-Off
Nick Helm took home the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s top humor prize for this groan-worthy joke.
Revisiting Márquez’s Speech
In December 1982, Gabriel García Márquez accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you haven’t read or heard his acceptance speech, you can now at Brain Pickings. We have a few pieces about the iconic author to pair with it.
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Five Rows of Startlingly Empty Chairs
“An easel stood just inside the big glass doorway when I entered the store. On it leaned my author photo, the one from the back cover of Domestic Violets, and it was fucking enormous. It was the size of a photo you’d expect to see if Bono had been appearing at Barnes & Noble, Bill Clinton maybe, or perhaps the Reverend Desmund Tutu. For a full 30 seconds I stood there and looked at the gigantic, painstakingly airbrushed picture of myself. An elderly couple walked in and did a double take when they saw a stunned-looking me looking at me. ‘It’s too big,’ I told them.” This is what you do when no one shows up to your reading.
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Food for Thought
At The New Inquiry, Christine Baumgarthuber writes about the elitist history of food writing before the age of the Internet. Pair with Darryl Campbell’s Millions essay on how food writing manifests social norms.
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“Some very tony shop”
“In the aftermath of tragedies, people become obsessive, do strange things. As the tragedy recedes and is sewn up into the past, these strange things appear increasingly weird to casual observers.” At The Rumpus, our own Lydia Kiesling reviews Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch, which centers around a fictional bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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