A Massachusetts mom said police went too far when they paid her and her 5-year-old daughter a visit for failing to return their library books on time.
5-Year-Old Library Thief
Not Quite a Novel, Not Quite a Tweet
Melville House’s “Art of the Novella” series gets some major, major love from Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.
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Sofi Thanhauser’s Sweeping History of Getting Dressed
Sofi Thanhauser's Worn is a wide-ranging exploration of clothing, and how it impacts our daily lives and the planet.
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Paul Murray on Epic Fail
“‘There’s no success like failure,’ Bob Dylan once sang – but he couldn’t have envisaged the international notoriety that bad art would achieve in the digital age. Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail gleefully hops genres and centuries in a quest to understand our obsession with lameness. Clever, profound, bitingly funny, it’s a brilliant analysis from one of the smartest new critics around.” — Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
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concerning
For those of you who’ve ever wondered to what extent e.e. cummings wrote prose the way he wrote poetry, there’s this letter to consider, published by The Paris Review Daily to commemorate the poet’s birthday. It’s addressed to Ezra Pound, and it features phrases including but not limited to “macarchibald maclapdog macleash.”
The Art of Translation
In general, fact-checking isn’t the most glamorous part of a journalist’s career, which is why Michael Erard was surprised to find that a recent fact-checking session for an Al Jazeera article turned out to be among the most interesting conversations of his life. Why? His sources were linguists, and their job was to explain to him the workings of brand-new sign languages.
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Fuck Yeah, NYRB
Who says publishers have weak brands? Someone loves the NYRB Classics so much they started a Tumblr blog about them. It is called, appropriately, Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics!
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