Chilean Communists want to exhume Pablo Neruda’s body to determine his actual cause of death. The endeavor is being undertaken because Neruda’s “former driver said he received an injection which provoked a heart attack.”
Back When Poets Had Drivers
What Charlie Kaufman Has to Offer
In 2011, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman gave a 70-minute lecture at the BFI in London. Little did he know Eliot Rausch would take snippets from that lecture, set them to accompanying, complementary visual clips, and turn the entire thing into a marvelous, beautiful video entitled What I Have to Offer.
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A Worthy Prize
The New York Public Library has named five finalists for its inaugural Harriet Tubman prize, which recognizes non-fiction books that explore the topic of slavery. You may also want to revisit our own Edan Lepucki's essay from a few years back on slavery in fiction.
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
"I couldn’t put the books down. Now that so many of us complain of diminished attention spans— our own as well as our companions’—it’s worth asking what has made millions of readers willing to suspend their disbelief—to suspend their selves—for thousands of pages." Why have so many people gone gaga for Ferrante and Knausgaard? We have our own theories as well.
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“I hate literature”
Recommended reading: The Guardian reports on Varlam Shalamov, a Russian author who spent 17 years in the harsh camps of the Kolyma gulag, wrote more than 140 short stories, and still claimed "“I hate literature. I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories. That is, I try to write not a short story but something that would not be literature.”
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For Your Weekend
Slate offers up a treatise on "the greatness of gin." (via my friend Derek, who wrote: "for your book blog; there is too little booze on it")
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What Makes the Pages Turn?
Recommended Reading: Do we read books for the plot or the characters?
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