Meanwhile, in NPR’s recording studio, classically trained violinist Aleksey Igudesman and pianist Hyung-ki Joo perform the most original rendition of “I Will Survive” you’re going to hear all year.
But When Will They Play “Free Bird?”
Really Old Lake, Even Older Forest
Which discovery is cooler? Russian scientists unearthing a 20-million-year-old lake beneath Antarctica, or Chinese scientists unearthing a 300-million-year-old forest beneath a coal mine?
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Great Moments in Travel Writing
The Telegraph publishes a piece by Paul Theroux in connection with his new book about travel lit, The Tao of Travel. In the piece, Theroux recounts some of the great feats of the genre.
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Not My Best Work
In the early eighties, when the writer James Lasdun was working in publishing, he rejected a book by a writer who turned out to be a pen name for Doris Lessing. The fallout? He couldn’t bring himself to read her work until this year. (Related: our own Mark O'Connell's interview with Lasdun about his latest book.)
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“O Warbling Beauty!”
"It can be difficult to talk about Uzbek without soaring into Orientalist flights. 'O warbling beauty of the steppe!' I started to write, like a 19th-century lady traveler." Our own Lydia Kiesling is in the New York Times writing about studying Uzbek and speaking Turkish.
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Zen and the Art of Failing at the Tour de France
What if the Tour de France nearly ground to a halt due to fiction? Imagine the best bikers in the world reading themselves into injury. At The Morning News, our own Matt Seidel imagines the chaos, making clear what happens when professional athletes meet page-turners. You could also read Matt’s essay on Tim Krabbé’s book The Rider.
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Byliner takes a book off of Amazon
Byliner, the experimental e-publisher of novella length nonfiction, had to take Buzz Bissinger's "After Friday Night Lights" off of Amazon when the mega-seller's price-matching algorithm tried to sell the book for nothing.