The Christopher Hitchens memoir, Mortality, a collection of essays based around the final pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair, now has an official U.S. release date of September, and the U.K. release date has been moved to coincide with that.
Hitchens Memoir Moved
Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts
LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history's most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances from Charles Baudelaire to John Berryman. (via bb)
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Notes From the Underground
Alexis Mainland documents New Yorkers from all walks of life reading on the subways -- the last outpost of low-tech, off-the-grid in-between time. (The NY Times)
Bookstores: Aquatic and Secret
In Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, there is an enchanting place known as the abandoned Library Boat. "It held a cargo of books," Ava Bigtree explains, "In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged, undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors." Now something similar has moored in England's canals. And, across the Atlantic, one New Yorker is keeping his own open secret.
Stars of Old Russia
In 1913, four years before the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II made the now-baffling claim that a writer named Teffi was the only major Russian writer. At the time, however, his endorsement made sense, because everybody in Russia, from royalty on down, read Teffi’s work and “delighted” in it. Until the revolution, at which point she was consigned to oblivion. William Grimes writes about a new collection of her stories.
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The Translator’s Tale
We don't often stop to think about the art of literary translation, but translator Margaret Jull Costa examines the field in her Times Literary Supplement essay on The Cahiers Series. "What these fascinating Cahiers offer is an insight into what literary translators actually do, as well as fuel for the endless debate about what we mean when we talk about 'faithful' translation."
#ThisIsWhere We Post Our Favorite Poems
Remember when I told you about the #ThisIsWhere poetry contest being organized by O, Miami and WLRN? Well, ten of the best submissions have been posted online since then.
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